New Author Chronicles

Manuscript is done, now for editing...

2010-11-23T20:02:00.000-05:00

It's been quite awhile since I updated the blog. Shame on me!

I didn't drop off the face of the planet, though. I finished the manuscript awhile ago. When I last posted, I was working on synopsis notes. Well, I had it printed out, I reviewed it, even a member of my family went through the manuscript and found more errors to correct.

For the past couple months I've actually been making more progress on the story; I hired a freelance editor, Paula Berinstein from the podcast called The Writing Show, to help me with tuning the storyline and plot points and character arcs. All I can say is that she's shown herself to be worth a LOT more than I paid her.

The beginning of the story has been completely changed to the point where it barely resembles the original opening (and I think it's actually better now.) Right now the work has slowed, slightly, as she's helping me develop mapped out character arcs. That...is...hard. To actually articulate the character arcs and develop them is in no way easy for me. But Paula has been great with helping me understand my weaknesses in this area and helping me find my way through developing this skill a little better. She's been wonderful at mentoring me.

I think my story has an arc for the primary character; the problem is that the secondary (and tertiary) characters have latent character arcs that we're trying to enhance. In the process it should make the story better in the long run.

This manuscript may never sell. The sad fact is that most manuscripts from first-time authors probably do not sell; but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. I of course hope that an agent will take an interest in the manuscript while I acknowledge that the odds are against me, and from there a publisher may take an interest. What I can say is that after Paula and I put it through the ringer it will at least boost the odds a few percentage points than if I didn't have her helping me.

All I can do now is continue working on the manuscript with Paula and see what the finished product emerges!

Still Plugging Away

2010-09-12T22:21:00.000-04:00

Okay, things have slowed down a bit. Part of it is because I'm going over the manuscript for what seems like the fifth time, even though I know this is actually the third time for me.

I'm working on synopsis notes. According to the "traditional wisdom" (meaning: information I can glean on what you're supposed to do to try getting science fiction published) you write the manuscript, polish it up a bit, then create a synopsis and a query letter then shop it to agents who in turn will try selling it to a publisher. After the couple years pass that this process takes...assuming you find someone willing to take a chance on you...you get an advance check that might cover a dinner at Red Lobster.

I'm working on the synopsis part. Specifically I'm working on the synopsis notes; a long distance friend advised me that I'll want to create several versions of the synopsis with varying lengths. I sat down and thought about it; the best way for me to do this is to create an overall summary of the manuscript, broken down by "chapter," from which to derive synopsis sheets. Once all of that is finished I could write an agent query since the query will require what is essentially the manuscript squeezed into a couple paragraphs (and this is a 390 page manuscript already...how do I squeeze everything down to less than a page!?)

Thankfully the notes are going really fast. I've caught a couple more typos along the way and made quick fixes to them as I see them. Just goes to show that no matter what there will be mistakes that slip by not once, not twice, but three times, with two sets of eyes reviewing it.

I'm also looking at printing a copy of the manuscript for someone who said he'd be a beta reader. I don't know how receptive I'll be to making huge changes unless he finds something really horribly off; then again, if something really doesn't work then I'll have to do what I have to (by the time he's done with it I may already be querying. With any luck.) I got a quote from FedEx Kinko's. Forty bucks. Ouch!

Then again it would be something to just have that manuscript, even in it's rough, possibly never publishable form, in my hands as a physical thing. It would be a way of saying that I accomplished something, that my year of work wasn't a total waste.

I might do this just for that feeling alone. That I accomplished something. I see a therapist for the issues I encounter dealing with life in my post-surgical state (insurance requirement, ironically). He said that just writing a novel length manuscript is quite an achievement that I should be proud of. Part of me wants to believe that. The other part says the proof is in an advance check. Otherwise this was little more than an exercise in trying to write but ending up wasting a year of time.

Much of this is my own confidence issues. I try to keep expectations realistic, and sometimes the pendulum swings a little farther into the "you're wasting your time" side of the equation. That's when the optimistic side reminds me that my end goal...of querying and getting those rejections...is the point I've been aiming for all along, and good or not, anyone can achieve the point of querying and getting rejected. I can do that. I'll just secretly hope that someone eventually doesn't reject it, and in the meantime, once I reach the querying point, this manuscript is getting set aside and I'll start working on the next story idea. And repeat the steps again, hoping this time it will sell.

I'm now on page 354 of 390 in the manuscript and my notes are 16 pages long. Considering that I'm just summarizing each chapter section and my notes are 16 pages so far I am hoping that this is a good sign that I can create a 2- to 5-page synopsis and maybe that one pager isn't quite so left field of realistic. Doing the math shows that so far I'm compressing an average of 22 pages to 1 page, approximately, just doing an off-the-cuff summary? Not too bad.

At this rate I'm hoping to have the notes done tomorrow or Tuesday. I slacked off over the weekend; I would have had it done today if I did what I was supposed to do. Whoops.

Manuscript UPDATE!

2010-08-05T21:26:00.000-04:00

Oh geez where do I begin? On August 1st, I finished my first round of edits on the manuscript!

My wife has the last pages now, and she's working on her editing for grammar, clarity, etc. etc...

Once she is done with that, I'll be printing up a copy or two and have a first reader lined up to go through it and give an opinion. I'm psyched!

I hate saying that because someone may read it just before acting as a first reader and be afraid to give honest feedback if it's negative. But that's okay! I'm psyched because for every person who has written a first draft of a novel, there are ten that sit on their butts and say they want to write a book or novel, but never get around to doing it. By getting not only that first draft done in something like six months but also finishing a round of editing and polishing, I'm ahead of the game. This alone was an accomplishment for me!

I fully expect this to not sell. I'm going to try to shop it, and I'll be disappointed if it doesn't get accepted. But it's a first effort. First novels are hard to sell, new authors are hard to sell, and overall, the realistic picture is never good. It's hard out there! But I still came out ahead, and that's what I'm proud of.

If someone does like the story then it's icing on the cake! I actually wrote a manuscript and made it through a round of editing!

Once my wife is finished with her edits I can give a final word count...now is one of those hard times, waiting for someone else to get time set aside to finish working on it...waiting is never easy.

A manuscript goal

2010-07-16T12:45:00.002-04:00

My new stated goal-I'm approaching a year since I started writing my manuscript. I went back and sifted through old entries on this blog to determine my "start date", and it turns out all I said was that I started it after submitting some contest entries to The Writing Show. I was pretty sure I had started writing the manuscript at the end of August, beginning of September; the vague wording of my blog entry seems to support this. My new goal is to finish my pass of editing the manuscript by the end of August.

If my wife finishes the batch of pages she currently has in her possession and then finishes my final set before September 1st...I can mark September as the time to begin working on my query letter and whatever other material may be needed for querying agents.

I then plan on getting a lot of rejections, feeling sorry for myself, and figuring out what I have to do to tweak the story and see if it can be salvaged to the point of submitting again to other agents until maybe...just maybe...it'll be accepted for representation, then hoping like crazy that it sells and brings in a paycheck.

That's the dream, anyway.

Wish me luck!

If the Editor Edits, Is This Still Mine?

2010-07-15T17:32:00.001-04:00

My first attempt at writing a novel is slowly taking shape. I wrote the first draft, then went back to start cleaning it up.

I'm catching a lot of little bits here and there; there are missing quotation marks, missing words here and there, and places where the wording was so awkward it makes a baby's first steps look graceful by comparison. So I cut and trim and alter things as I can.

My wife is far more trained in the art of utilizing the English language. As I moved through my manuscript, I would bundle up a batch of pages I went through (say, 50 pages at a time) and send them to her for editing. Essentially the story is getting a light touch-up by me then a heavier edit by her in one pass...I edit edit edit, then send it to her and when she's done I re-integrate her changes into the master manuscript.

But this got me thinking...is the story still mine?

I think it's a ridiculous thought. I mean, the story itself is still mine. I came up with it. She's not adding characters or changing events (yet...I am waiting for her to start suggesting things that work or don't work and I'm hoping it'll help improve the story.)

Still; there was always this little fantasy that I would be able to sit down and create a great story that would be well received as it is. I could write it out, edit it, and not rely on the crutch of a third-party to alter this and fix that and...essentially, by the time I saw the story or work in print, I'd read it and not find a spot where I'm scratching my head wondering why a particular passage didn't seem familiar. "I don't remember writing that," I think to myself.

I go back to my manuscript and reread the section. "That's because I didn't write that..."

Is the story still mine?

Perhaps the idea of a great story that sells is kind of a fiction in itself. From what I can tell from reading various blogs and stories on the publishing industry, unless you're Stephen King you probably won't have the clout to make the story 100% yours. If you're fortunate enough to have your manuscript picked up by an agent who then finds a publishing house willing to sell your story, you're going to have copy editors, editors, your agent, etc. all having a hand in shaping the story.

You as the author create a framework and most of the meat for the book. Then you're going to have a lot of surgeons using their plastic surgery techniques to enhance your book for marketability. There will be tweaks to layout, certain wording, etc. until they think it's ready to sell. So again...the end result is a story that should be close to what the author wrote, but not exactly what they turned in.

At least, that's my impression. Maybe someday I'll find out.

Manuscript Progress

2010-07-14T18:22:00.001-04:00

Me oh my. It looks like quite a bit of time has passed since I posted an update!

Well, there's a reason for that. I've been working on the manuscript.

My last post had me halfway through the first draft with editing with a few chapters sent to a friend to read. I have mixed news on that front; the friend never asked for more pages to read. But she's busy and there wasn't really any expectation for her to have time to read it, so I'm not upset.

This post finds me nearly finished with the first pass of the manuscript. The first draft had 112,240 words; at the moment it has 96,958 words, and I'm making steady progress to the end. OpenOffice tells me that I'm on page 366 of 402, and as I cut words the page count goes down (duh) so the end is a moving target. This does mean that I have less than 40 pages to go before hitting "the end" again!

The important thing is that I fit some time in every day to review and cut. I may not be making huge leaps and bounds every day, but I do try to get at least a third of a page reviewed. I squeeze it in whenever I have some time; before bed, after work, half an hour to an hour over the weekend days. And every paragraph I review is one more paragraph down, one more paragraph closer to being able to sit down and work on another story!

Soon I hope to be able to sit down and start compiling a list of things needed to try shopping it around. I can't say I'm confident that it will find representation, but I do feel it's getting near a point where I need to try. If I wait too long or keep polishing polishing polishing, I'll never get around to trying to sell it, and never slapping a "good enough" label on it to shop it around is about as good as not writing it at all.

Small Edit: The online friend I was referring to above emailed me to ask me not to read into her not asking for more of the manuscript to read; I replied to her (and hope that it's not stuck in her spam filter! Hopefully she'll see this edit and know to look for it!) to let her know that I was just putting that note in the blog entry just to follow up on the previous entry I had. I am in no way offended! I should do an entry on my philosophy of paying dues in trying to get published as an author.

To be honest, I've been neglecting the blog in large part because I've been spending more spare time playing with the manuscript and life activities; the blog would look very boring if I just kept entering counts every day so I was waiting to reach more of a milestone to report. However, I noticed that quite a bit of time had passed since my last entry and while I was chipping away at the manuscript and making progress, it was taking a lot of time to reach that milestone. So I put this entry in.

I fully understand that my friend has been busy; she's had a lot on her plate, and that's just with the things I knew were going on in her life! So I am in no way offended or reading into her not asking for follow up pages. I just wanted her to know that and I in no way intended for her to be hurt or offended by the quick mention in the blog entry here! (Believe me...if I were, I'd say so. I have a tendency to be...blunt?...with my thoughts. The closest I get to subtlety is masking names in the blog entries because I want to maintain some semblance of anonymity in my activities and privacy of others being discussed.)

Edit Edit Edit Edit

2010-04-16T09:25:00.000-04:00

I don't dedicate hours a day to editing my first draft. I work on it on and off, in small, digestible chunks. And so far I am proud to say that I'm past the halfway point. Not by leaps and bounds, but significantly past the midway point.

Yay, me!

I just noticed I hadn't updated the blog in awhile and thought I'd add this quick update to show that I haven't quit. Nope, not by a long shot.

I even had an Internet friend ask about reading the story. She had previewed the first chapter (well, what kind of passed for a first chapter), and despite her busy schedule said she'd like to see more. So I packed up the bit that was once-overed by both myself and my wife, converted it to PDF (thank you OpenOffice...) and emailed it to her.

She's a busy woman and she said she couldn't guarantee that she'd get through it soon and that's fine. As far as I am concerned she's reading it for entertainment. Inwardly I'm thinking that if she starts reading it and enjoys it to the endpoint and asks for more of the story, then it is on the right track. That's what a story is supposed to do and that's what you to do get an agent or publisher interested; they pick up the story and you hook them right off the bat, leading them with a finger through the nose from plot point to plot point, and when nature calls they agonize over the decision of whether to wet themselves or finish just one more paragraph.

If she likes it and wants more, I'm on the right track.

If I bore her, then something's not working.

Maybe she'll ask for more, maybe not. Whatever happens I hope she enjoys it as a halfway decent time-killing story.

In the meantime I should be getting back to my editing...

Update on Novel Progress

2010-03-27T12:08:00.010-04:00

Wow, it's been awhile since I posted!

Have no fear...I haven't given up, both people who read this blog!

I'm still editing the story. I'm nearly halfway through the current incarnation of the story, and slowly making my way through a turning point.

There have been some setbacks due to personal issues in life taking up my time and energy, so things have slowed a little. But every little bit of progress is progress nonetheless. I have to keep believing that.

In other news, I submitted the opening of the story to a podcast that selected it as one of the manuscripts to review for criticism on their next release coming out this weekend.

To say I'm nervous is a bit of an understatement. The only thing keeping me from obsessing about it are the previously mentioned personal issues. I am hoping the hosts have found some positive points to the story but I know that no story is perfect and I have little doubt there is plenty that can be cleaned up.

That's a nice way of saying that while I don't expect them to love it, I hope they at least like it (or some of it) but I fully expect some need for a thick skin after I get the nerve to listen to the podcast. This was my first attempt at writing a novel-length story. People rarely do well with their first foray into a new skill, and this podcast will no doubt reinforce that lesson!

How's That Editing Thing Coming Along?

2010-02-14T21:26:00.000-05:00

Believe it or not I've not abandoned it. I'm past the 1/4 of the novel mark and rapidly heading into the halfway point.

I've been making some changes to my workflow that slowed me down a little...namely the Users Must Hate Me blog talks about the particular changes, so I won't belabor them here.

I'll just say that I have my backups in place again, I have my new writing platform ready to go, and now I'm going to be digging back in to work on the novel! Wish me luck!

The Writing Show Podcast Feed

2010-02-10T11:24:00.000-05:00

There was a recent show that I really enjoyed listening to, regarding the recent melee between Amazon and MacMillan. The Writing Show has great resources for authors and wanna-be authors! Check out this show and let me know if you enjoyed it the way I liked it...

Editing Fun and Projects

2010-02-10T09:25:00.000-05:00

I cannot claim to be a successful writer. Not in good conscience, anyway. I know that Mur Lafferty advised that a writer is someone who writes, and I'm trying to fill those shoes, but there's a part of me that wants define a writer as someone who writes and has an audience, preferably paid, as a form of validation of success. It's a tangible way to say, "Look! I've made it!"

But I think I'm getting some clue of what it is like for new writers to try to balance practical life with writing life.

I have a day job. Not one that I've been really loving lately, but it pays the mortgage. I've been spending spare time working on the novel I wrote. The first draft ended at 112,240 words. I'm going back through it and trimming material out; as of this moment, OpenOffice is saying that my novel is 108,023 words, so between my wife and I we've cut 4,217 words, and I'm only about a quarter of the way through the manuscript.

(What can I say? Paula B. was right...it takes a lot longer than we think to get through these things!)

The problem I've had lately is that I'm not spending discrete blocks of time working on the novel. While writing it, I would sit for an hour here, an hour there, and have a word count goal of 500 words at least per sitting (usually hitting 1,000 to 2,000). With editing it doesn't work like that (although I could do it in blocks, I just don't). I don't have a concrete goal each session, and setting one like "work until I chop out 500 words" would be silly, as it kind of imposes an arbitrary limitation on the work. I should be trying to edit to make it sound better and not edit just to cut things out ("I like this scene, but I really need to get to bed..." )

The other problem is that I look at my Writers Block Notebook my wife gave me for Xmas and I feel a pang to work on those ideas for stories. I already told myself I can't work on two of these at once...I simply can't keep splitting time up more and manage to get this done in a decent amount of time. I want (need) to get one ready for submissions and rejections before moving on to something else. That was kind of the reason for the notebook; a place to put ideas so I'd have a back burner to refer to.

But there's an allure to the idea of moving on to the next idea. What if this one tanks? What if this one sucks?! Then I'll have something that could possibly be better ready to go sooner!

And I have no illusions that this first story is great. I really think that it needs some feedback and work. That's part of the reason I'm giving it a once-over, and my wife is giving a second-over to it. A different set of eyes catches things that I don't. And she kind of does this sort of thing for a living since she has an English degree, so I'm confident in her abilities.

I am pulled to try another story and see how it goes. But each time I stop myself. "Get back to what you promised yourself you'd work on," I tell myself. "Fun stuff later. You need to re-read the work you already did."

"But I'm a worse editor than I am a writer!" I whine.

"Doesn't matter. You'll only get better, even if it's just a tiny bit better, if you try it again. Now, EDIT!" says my brain.

I frown, I pout, I procrastinate, but I open the word processor and have at it again.

I'm slowly going through the manuscript. I keep the more fun projects on the back burner, and as ideas come to me I write them down. Occasionally I remind myself that working on a new story is a reward for finishing the editing task at hand first...

Update on Progress; Where Have I Been?

2010-01-27T18:19:00.001-05:00

Oh, dear, it has been a long time, hasn't it?

The truth is that I've simply been very busy. I don't have many readers to my blog, so I shifted my priorities. Why? Because I needed to focus on my story!

I've had other private things going on to deal with as well, such as a car accident that totaled my car and subsequently wrangling a new car; it happens to be a Toyota. If you have seen the news lately you know how these things are working out for me in general...

At any rate, the first draft was finished, and currently is having a first-pass to clean it up. Right now the manuscript, which started at 112,240 words, is now at 108,481 words, for a cut of 3,759 words, and I'm still in the first half of the document.

As I hack and slash and reword I then divvy up some of the work I've reviewed to English-major wife, who in turn hacks and slashes and rewords and sends it back to me to re-integrate to the manuscript.

So I haven't disappeared. I'm simply keeping busy doing what I should be doing. Writing!

New Novel Progress: Heading into the New Year

2010-01-03T06:40:00.036-05:00

It's been awhile since I updated this blog. It's not for lack of writing, though. I even managed to update my other blogs periodically. Primarily I hadn't updated here because I was working on the first draft.

My previous goal was to finish before December so I could have a quick editing pass completed before New Year's. That goal was missed by a month. I managed to actually "complete" the first draft within hours of midnight on December 31st, so I managed to complete my first draft of a novel in the twilight of the year 2009.

What did I end up with? A manuscript with (according to OpenOffice) a word count of 112,240 words, which isn't bad when you consider that fantasy/science fiction is supposed to be approximately 100,000 words.

The story needs a lot of work. There are plenty of places to tweak and bend, and I said I "completed" the draft because I'm not entirely sure I like the ending; it may need heavy rewriting before it's something I like personally. After I have a quick and dirty chop session I plan on having a beta reader with far more of a clue about grammar read through it and give a brutal set of suggestions of what to alter and rewrite.

I've worked hard on it, but I also work to not become so attached to my baby that I'm unwilling to chop out what needs to be chopped out to make a story that other people would enjoy. I wrote a story that I enjoyed, and even then I enjoyed it as I went along writing it. I haven't re-read it to see if I can enjoy it without having to work on it along the way yet (and no doubt spend much of that cringing while wondering what I was thinking when I wrote XYZ).

It's a first attempt. It's rough. It may not be something usable, but if there's a nugget of usable story then I'd like to salvage it. My wife pointed out that in saying things like this it sounds like I'm fishing for compliments; I'm actually trying to work against that. I have read many many accounts of people who are afraid to give criticism because authors aren't looking for creative criticism as much as they are praise.

I don't want artificial praise. If you like it, let me know, that's fine. But I want the rough parts to be sanded away, and parts that need fixing to be fixed. I can't try to sell this without having something that someone besides me enjoys, and glaring mistakes or issues should be smoothed out before that. I need my beta readers to know that I want honest feedback. There may be things I disagree with but for the most part I want to know about what others think does and doesn't work in the story.

But this is going off topic. The point is that as things go, I have a skeleton of a story, and I managed to complete it just shy of 2010. Now I want to spend the next couple months with editing and polishing a bit. Then comes the fun part...collecting rejection slips!

On the other hand while shopping for additions to the rejection slip pile maybe I'll start a new story...but that's getting ahead of myself. With luck, maybe I'll have an update soon on the status of my editing work.

Researching Your Writing

2009-12-15T19:32:00.000-05:00

"Write what you know."

I thought this was an interesting bit of wisdom in the writing community. "Write what you know." Think about it for a bit.

I understand the thinking. How can you write about life in a jail if you haven't been in jail? How can you relate to a person who has had bariatric surgery without being a bariatric patient?

At the same time, I think this would make for some boring stories, too. Does this mean that a male writer can't have a female protagonist (or what does it mean if he does and does it well)? What about science fiction, where I really doubt that most writers of sci fi have actually been on a starship?

I bring this up because my story's "new ending" had taken a turn for a real-life town that I haven't been to. I've been to the state it's in, but not that specific town (that's like comparing a backwoods home in the mountains of New York to downtown...New York, I suppose). I can relate only to some aspects of the area in that I've experienced the climate and some of the differences someone from the northeastern states feels in a wildly different part of the country...put it that way.

But that means that I'm incorporating details that are real without ever being there. I've been trying to get as much as I can through researching the towns. Fortunately I live in the age of the Internet; there are videos of the town online, Google Earth helps me with directions and lay of the land, and there are some pictures and images through Google Image search. It's really helped with details of things like mileage, road descriptions, and even the description of a parking lot.

I still can't help but wish that I could actually visit the site and incorporate those experiences into the story. But then again, leaving it somewhat vague keeps from bogging readers down in details that are unnecessary.

The only other solution would be to make up details and create my own places much like Springfield for the Simpsons or Silent Hill being based on Centralia, PA. I don't like that as much. Speaking as someone who went to visit Centralia after finding out some of the background of Silent Hill, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience, despite finding just about nothing there if for no other reason than enjoying the, "I was there!" experience when I see it in the news or on TV. There's an almost visceral connection to a place like that, a place that you hear about or interact with virtually then experience in real life. It's similar to the thrill of participating in discussions and interacting with your favorite podcast hosts, making them more real and you feel less disconnected when they say your name and know that this faceless voice is speaking to you.

That's part of the reason I incorporated this particular location into the story. Even if it never sells, never gets published, I know that if I wanted to (if this is the ending I actually keep, that is) I could go visit these places. I could interact with them, and know that out there this place exists, hopefully as I describe them.

Does anyone else out there write like this? Or do I have the wrong idea, and should I just stick to those things that I have more direct experience with?

Knowing When It's Just Not Working

2009-12-12T08:52:00.000-05:00

I recently cut about 15,000 words from my first draft. I was working on the scenes leading to the climax ending and I realized that it was getting harder and harder to make progress on the story.

I realized that the story was straying too far from plausibility, which is really saying something for a science fiction story. It was becoming a chore because I was trying to steer it back "on track", and I didn't like where it was going.

At some point I just decided that it wasn't going to work. There was no saving it, and I didn't feel like waiting until I was editing it to rewrite that whole section of work. So I chopped it off and started again, proposing a "what if?" scenario to steer the ending into a new direction.

Does this violate my rule about not editing while writing? I don't think so. I believe it's foolish to keep plodding forward on a plot that just isn't working; I'm using my enthusiasm for the story as it unfolds as a gauge to how well (or poorly) the story is going. This wasn't a matter of tweaking some wording or adding some choice adjectives. It was a matter of seeing that the storyline was going way off script, and fixing it by cutting off the bad part and starting over a from a few steps back.

Doing this threw me off a little, of course, since I'm wwinding back and forward to spare a section of story that did still fit while figuring out what details I thought I had and now don't. It would also be silly to have a character or detail reappear after never being introduced because I used my delete key overzealously.

Anyone else have to cut out large sections of a story to re-steer it into a better direction? I'd have a hard time believing it is that rare of an occurrence!

Details: How Much is Too Much?

2009-12-10T10:12:00.052-05:00

TMI. Too much information. Too little information?

How much detail should you include in your descriptions used in your story?

Part of this is, no doubt, a part of your personal voice and style. As with so many things in writing, there doesn't seem to be a clear-cut rule except when it comes to extremes.

For example, you probably wouldn't want to read a story that consisted of paragraphs sounding like, "Bill got in his car and drove to the store. He picked up groceries. He then left the store and got into an accident. He was depressed."

On the other hand, I'd grow bored reading something that sounded a lot more like, "Bill, dressed in his pleated khaki pants and favorite leather belt and his oversized button up shirt coupled with a satin red tie, ran in long elegant strides to his blue 2005 Honda with a smatter of filth on the windshield and worn windshield wipers. He pushed the unlock button on the black keyfob and the locked clicked open with a musical chirp in the key of F. Bill lifted the handle and swung his size 38 rear end into the well worn leather seat, inserted the key into the starter and turned it one-quarter turn for the three seconds necessary to allow the engine to catch. He paused and listened to the sputter of the spark plugs igniting the fuel mixture in his 98,000 mile-worn engine..." At this rate, somewhere in chapter seven he might be finally able to purchase his groceries and I'll be slogging through his pondering of monosodium glutamate.

I've found one author who advises new authors to be more sparse in their descriptions. I wish I still had the link to the author that I read this from; he basically said that when you don't fill in the blanks for every detail, the reader will automatically impose his or her own ideas to fill in the story, and make the story more their own. Describe the bare minimum detail about the heroine; if her breast size and fingernail length aren't important to the story, don't discuss it. The reader will not miss anything you don't describe, and the only things they need to know are things that pertain to the character as an intrinsic detail and things that pertain to the plot or distinguishes the character from other characters.

In other words...less is more.

Perhaps this is a lot of "duh" for other people. The way I'm wired, I need to consciously remember this detail when going through the work. As I rework my story, I'll be asking myself, "Is this important for the reader? Is this a detail that can be omitted without harming the story? If so, it gets chopped.

From what I can tell (and from stories I typically enjoy) the story should flow from point to point without meandering side trips into details that are mundane or have nothing to do with the story. Unless something is going to happen because of that detail, do I really need to know that your hero had a broken wrist when he was seven or is a huge fan of Applebee's riblets? Don't get me mired in background. Get me entrenched in the story, because the story is the thing!

Maybe other people have other viewpoints or insights on this. If so I'd love to hear from you. My first draft is coming along; I'm wrapping up the ending, then I'll give it a quick once-over rough rough edit and then read it to see if there's something resembling a decent story woven into whatever makes it to the page at that point. I'll be reading it with an eye on details that aren't really needed, and for spots that could use some better details and information. I'll be looking for a story that makes me want to keep reading; the less of a chore it is to review, the better I'll hope the story is.

If you're an author or have experience in writing I'd love to know what you think of the amount of details necessary to a make a compelling story. Please share!

Writing Rules I Live (Or At Least Write) By

2009-12-07T11:11:00.002-05:00

I've not compiled this in a single post anywhere to my recollection, so I thought I'd put this down now for others.

First, some obligatory disclaimers. I'm an aspiring author. I have not been officially published. I have had an essay or two published in a collection, but I don't really count that since I wasn't paid for the work and the publication itself struck me as being vanity-published more than anything else; it was framed as a contest, winners were published, and on reflection they're getting content with little to nothing for the author outside of ego stroking. I count that as vanity publishing. Maybe others would have other opinions on that.

Second disclaimer: I'm a firm believer that there is no single how-to in publishing or writing novels. If there were a set of rules that you could check off in over to achieve a lucrative career in publishing your novels, I'm sure it would have already been published as a how-to book and there would be no need for people to call themselves wanna-be writers. They'd just follow the steps and collect checks.

So with that in mind, I'll tell you my current "rules to writing," in no particular order, I am currently following to create a manuscript.

Rule One: sit your behind in front of a keyboard and type. Very important step. A writer is a writer because he or she writes. Dreaming of writing makes you a wanna-be writer. I've graduated from wanna-be writer to wanna-be published author. Why? Because I'm writing.

Rule Two: write consistently to achieve a set goal. By goal, I mean a daily word count. I inevitably have some days where I don't make my count. Things happen. Life happens. Things get in the way. I have a family that needs attention as well as a day job. Sometimes that word count just ain't gonna happen. But these are rare days. Usually once every two weeks or so by my reckoning. My initial goal was 500 words a day. I've since found that I tend to get a little over a thousand words down in an hour under the right conditions, so I usually manage to get that thousand words down, far exceeding my goal. I've had several days where I managed to get 1,500 to 2,000 words.

Rule Three: I'm allowed to suck. I totally stole that from Mur Lafferty. But I need it. It gave me the permission to overlook my insecurities about writing in order to find the courage to follow my first rule...sit down and write. It ties to the next rule...

Rule Four: You can't edit a blank page. I think I heard this somewhere but I don't know the attribution. The words, however, stuck in my head. Crap or not, you can't polish the story unless you have the story down first to edit. And as it turns out, yes, you can polish a turd. I remember this episode of Mythbusters whenever I doubt that my story is good enough to keep working on.

Rule Five: If the doubt tells you to quit altogether, ignore it. Doubts are cheap, and they're found in swarms, especially if you feel you need validation in doing something new with little experience or education in the field of writing. There are always reasons to quit. I need just a few good reasons to keep going.

Rule Six: Carve some time to yourself for writing. I try to work by myself for an hour a day. I hide in the bedroom with a laptop. I make sure I take my lunch hour and type away at the desk. I've taken my laptop with me to Barnes and Noble to sit in their comfy chair with a lapdesk (I happen to have one our B&N no longer sells so I can kind of "prove" I'm not pilfering it from their sales displays) and just type away. I needed to find an environment in which I can half-focus on my story with minimal distraction.

Rule Seven: No editing. I backspace and fix obvious spelling errors. I will fix things that just bug me as they're on the virtual page. But I do not go back and rewrite scenes and pages of work. If I do that, I'll end up spending days, or weeks, or even months trying to get a "perfect opening" or making the entire novel a masterpiece magnum opus. The idea is to get a story out there on the page that can be fixed as needed, then shop it around to agents. Editing can be done after the initial draft is complete. I keep getting a strong urge to rewrite the opening and every time I end up reminding myself of this rule! It can be hard to see obvious blemishes in your baby and have to wait until later to fix them, but the danger of getting "stuck" in fixing the story and never actually finishing the story is way too big for me to hazard this road.

Rule Eight: Tell the story. Grammar, structure, etc...those can be fixed later (see Rule Seven). The important thing is to have a story! Tell your story. The mechanics can be revisited later. The story is the thing. The story is the thing. The story is the thing!

Rule Nine: Keep notes. I don't keep copious notes, but I do keep enough to go back and spruce certain things up. I keep notes on full names of characters as I introduce them in the story (you don't want to change a character midway through because you forgot if you used Matthew or Mathew as the given name...makes search and replace more difficult as well.) If you add a particular plot point or device in the story, you probably don't want to forget about it. In my case I'm keeping a text file with my notes in the same folder as the file containing the story.

Rule Ten: Make backups. I'll wager most writers now are using those new-fangled computers on which to write. Computers fail. Hardware is stolen, damaged, or data gets corrupted. Do yourself a favor and get a USB flash drive. Edit your work, and immediately save it elsewhere. Personally I have my notes and current draft on my main computer and on a USB drive, and the version on the computer gets backed up to three external hard drives. If my house burns down I may lose the draft, but I still am protected against most failures of hardware and most incidences of corruption. If you're laboring over a 100,000 page manuscript plus notes plus editing time...isn't the investment in some external storage for copying your work periodically really just a drop in the bucket? It's insurance against losing your work. I see no reason whatsoever to feel bad for 90% of writers that have data loss that destroys their work in progress when the ability to make copies is cheap and simple. "I don't know how" is not really an excuse anymore. If you're talking about writing as anything more than a hobby, then making backups of your livelihood is just part of the cost of doing business!

Rule Eleven: Write consistently to keep the ball rolling. If you decide to take a break, suddenly you forget what your protagonist was doing, or you forgot some detail that was important at the time (how did your hero pull a knife on the antagonist when he strapped on a gun before leaving his apartment?). It can be argued that these belong in the notes; they probably do. My way of working means that if it's an immediate detail I normally remember it the next day, while notes are made for things that will keep popping up or will be important a week from now. Taking a break of a few days in a row means you probably have to really push yourself to get back behind the keyboard and write again, just like skipping the gym a few days means needing that pep talk to get dressed to work out, shuffle to the car, drive to the gym...writing has enough challenges. You don't need to force yourself into a pep talk to do something you should be enjoying.

Rule Twelve: Write while you enjoy it. If you enjoy your story you increase the chances that your reader will enjoy it. I think that when it comes to fiction (or non-fiction, I suppose) you end up pushing some of your enthusiasm for the subject or story onto the reader. They pick up where you lose interest, and they know when your heart just isn't into it anymore. A good story should draw in the writer as much as the reader. If it fails to do so, you need to reevaluate the plot points and see why you're not caring about the protagonist and his or her journey through your created world.

Rule 13: Progress is progress. I have a goal of 500 words a day. I actually have come to expect 1,000+ words a day. There are some days where I fall short...like, a couple hundred words are all I manage to tap out before I have to call it quits for one reason or another. But that one or two hundred words are one or two hundred words more than that manuscript started the day with. I can't beat myself up over that. There are good days and bad days. The important thing is to keep making progress and keep getting a little farther ahead. As a result there are actually very very few days where I've made zero progress on the story, and I've had a few days that were only a couple hundred words and I have had a few days where I really surpassed my average by a significant margin. If I fall short one day...make it up later. I can't dwell on my shortcomings or I'll never finish the first draft!

I'm not a published author. I'm on the first steps towards trying to achieve that goal. I may fail miserably, and you can take my rules for what they're worth. In my world they have helped sustain me through many a doubt and many a fear, and I've written over one hundred thousand words with these rules in mind. I'm sure that as I go along I'll need to modify or add to these rules. For right now, at this stage in the game, I'm sticking to these. What do you think? Are there rules you use or rules you think should be altered here?

Writing Yourself Into a Corner

2009-12-03T20:29:00.000-05:00

My current word count: 103,157, according to OpenOffice.

The topic: writing yourself into a corner. Ever have that happen?

I was aiming for around 100,000 to 110,000 words. That seems to be an approximate target for scifi novels, and while my story doesn't really involve spaceships it does seem to fit that kind of genre.

As you can see I've already blipped over the low end of the target range.

The thing is, I was coming up on what I thought was going to be the final scenes. Then I sat back and thought about how the main character and the antagonist were going to play it out; I discovered that no matter how I sliced it I didn't like the quick and dirty ending I originally sort of pictured.

This is something that probably depends a lot on your style of creating your story, though. I had only the roughest outline in my head of what I wanted to have happen. I don't have it broken down, as some people do, into a rought skeleton on which to hang more details and layer more details until all that needs to be done by the fifth time through is to add some adjectives and voila...done!

I've heard of other writers that will picture how they want the story to end, write that scene, then rewind and work up to that point. Not me!

Nope, I started with a "wouldn't it be cool if..." then started writing. My wife looked at a part of the early first draft and right off the bat said, "This opening is horrible..."

And she was right. I know what I need for an opening paragraph, an opening sentence, and my first draft's opening was truly sucktacular. Why? Because I had an extremely nebulous idea in my head of what I wanted to story out, and I sat down and just started typing until the idea started getting traction and headed the way of something resembling a story. As a result, the opening wanders, and has little to do with grabbing reader attention. The first half of the first chapter was more an exercise in gaining focus and introducing characters.

I think this is called "organic writing".

At this point I'm over my 100,000 mark and realizing that the ending will take a little longer than anticipated. That's okay! I thought about what I was going to do, I have a tentative idea of what to do for a resolution. And it will be longer than anticipated.

Why? A few reasons.

One, this is a first draft. The ending may not work, the middle may have parts that don't work, and I may have issues with continuity in my first draft that I haven't even caught yet. Apparently there are times where parts of the story make perfect sense to me because I actually wrote the parts that make sense in my head, and not in the document. It happens. That 100,000 word count may quickly drop when I have to hack and slash parts out as well as redo scenes and details. It only takes about four pages of text to disappear to lose 1,000 words (as I recall the rough estimate is 250 words is about a page of text).

Second, I could change things. Like Paula B. left in a comment to the previous message, there could be ten or more rewrites in store. If the ending (or middle or beginning) doesn't work, I may need to rewrite entire chapters. This could dramatically alter my word count in one fell swoop of the delete key, and my word count is largely meaningless at the moment.

Third, page length is a guideline. Now, ignoring the word count entirely is a bad bad idea. No agent or publisher is going to accept an unknown author with a 300,000 word novel just because you think it's "da' bomb", and they probably don't care if you think they don't know what they're doing by passing up your work. But when you get a rough guideline of 100,000 words for a scifi novel and you come in at 120,000...well, they'll either tell you they'll take it on the requirement that you chop out 15,000 or so words, or they'll...probably tell you to chop out some of the words. If it's a good story, if they think it'll sell, they'll buy it if it's close to their guidelines. The important thing is the story. Grab them, entrance them, woo them...if they can't put down your manuscript, chances are you'll sell it to them, even if it is over (or under) size.

I'm not saying my story is the next big thing. I would hope it is, but let's face it...odds are stacked against me. A first story, from an unknown, still learning as he goes along. That's a really long shot. But if I focused entirely on reality then I'd quickly conclude this isn't worth the effort, and quite frankly I want to make a go at trying to be successful at something like this. So I have to focus on the possible positives as well as the likely negatives!

So what do I do now that I've written myself into a corner where my word count is steadily climbing and my ending is getting a little longer than I liked?

I keep writing. I write until there's something resembling a decent ending, then I give it a quick scan to fix up the beginning, alter some details here and there, give it the roughest coat of polish possible. Then I give it to someone else and see how much they recoil and how much effort it takes them to plow through it to the end, if they make it that far. I get feedback. I rework things that aren't working for them. I get this feedback early so I'm not agonizing over details in a chapter that will have to be tossed out completely.

Most importantly I keep going. I wish I could remember where I first heard, "You can't edit a blank page," so I could give proper credit where it's due. It's true. I can't stop and ponder forever what to do with the ending or wait for the perfect ending...I have to keep going, or I'll shelve my project and just never come back to it. So I just keep asking myself what should happen next, then I go with it. I know I could change it later if I have to.

I guess I'm saying that in my naivete there's no such thing as truly writing yourself into a corner. You just keep writing. Ask, "What should happen next given the current circumstances?" and you write it. Then you ask it again. And again. And again. If inspiration strikes later, you'll go back and fix it. But first, get the story down so you'll have something to fix!

Goals and Writing

2009-12-01T21:21:00.000-05:00

My word count stands at 98,896 on the first draft.

I had been hoping to finish my first draft in November, spend December editing and rewriting, and then celebrate the New Year by starting my agent/publisher search and collecting my rejection notices.

Well, I still have a few more bits to go on the first draft. I'm thinking I'm very close to my final scenes as I have them laid out in my head, but I obviously didn't quite make my "Done In November" goal.

This brings me to goals in writing. I'm a little disappointed that I didn't make it, obviously, but I can't let it keep me down. I have, however, been keeping to my previous goal of 500+ words per day. Almost every day I have added over 1,000 words to the first draft. For me, with my schedule, that's very good. There have been only a few days where I have skipped adding to my manuscript, and if you average out my progress I have still managed to keep ahead of my goal by a decent margin.

Writing a book, or attempting to write a book in my case, takes discipline. Wanna-be writers have a huge bag of excuses at their disposal to derail writing that Great American Novel. I have plenty of them; I lack time, I lack talent, and the odds are greatly stacked against new authors trying to break into the market, the effort isn't worth it for the amount of money the vast majority of authors make from months (or years) of toil...

...and it's all true, for the most part. Or at least in some way valid.

So I started setting goals and evaluating how to meet those goals, and admitted that it takes a certain amount of discipline to meet those goals. I cut time out of the TV time to be replaced with "placing my butt in the seat and the hands on the keyboard". I don't have a home office space so I will take a laptop into the bedroom with a lapdesk so I have a slightly quieter space to try focusing a little better on my story.

My most basic goal is to make some advancement on the story each day, be it a 100 words or 1,000 words. I have good days and bad days, but I've had very very few days where I don't add something to the first draft.

I use these goals to keep me motivated through the doubts and fears. I don't have an English degree, I didn't even really like my English classes in school. I don't know if anyone would like my story; they very well might not. I fully acknowledge that this is a first attempt at writing anything more complicated than a long email and as such it will very likely not be anything near what the masters on the shelves at Barnes and Noble have written.

On the other hand, Anne Coulter and Glenn Beck have had books released as well.

So I plug on, focusing on my goals more than my fears. If I never get published, I'll have pride in knowing that I tried, and that I gave it an honest effort in addition to the pride of having made my goals and stuck with them.

If you want to achieve something in life you need to create goals to help measure your progress. If you don't make a milestone, you reassess and move on, continuing to make progress. Only fail yourself by giving up on your goals...so...I've failed to finish the first draft in November. I'm now going to try focusing on finishing it up as soon as I can into December so I can start editing and rewriting, and still at least try to start the query process in January. It's not too late to meet that goal yet...

The Reality of Making Income as an Author

2009-11-24T18:36:00.000-05:00

Lynn Viehl had a reposted article on the Publetariat blog discussing her sales and royalties from Twilight Fall, a top twenty New York Times bestseller.

As has been customary, a quick update on my own work. I'm still plugging away on my first draft of a novel; I am currently at 92,465 words, and still keeping up an average of about a thousand words a day. I think that's pretty good while holding up another job and family. Well, my job. I don't have another family. We now return to my post-motivational-mention-of-wordcount blog post.

Lynn discusses quite a bit of information about her income on that book, which is a real jewel considering how few bits of information like this come out. The scary part is the uncertainty; she's a bestselling author, established, and that makes her not exactly in the same boat as people who are trying to break into the industry. But if I (and other beginners) somehow manage to "make it", this may be one possible outcome.

The details are spelled on on the blog posting, but she said that the total net sales for the novel are 61,663 copies. Her net earnings on this particular statement was $2,434.38...she noted that it would probably take another six months to a year to earn out the last of her advance ($50,000).

She says:
So how much money have I made from my Times bestseller? Depending on the type of sale, I gross 6-8% of the cover price of $7.99. After paying taxes, commission to my agent and covering my expenses, my net profit on the book currently stands at $24,517.36, which is actually pretty good since on average I generally net about 30-40% of my advance. Unless something triggers an unexpected spike in my sales, I don’t expect to see any additional profit from this book coming in for at least another year or two.

From what I understand, an advance of $50,000 is reserved for authors who are established and can generally be counted on as having solid sales. I don't have any solid proof, per se, but I believe that a beginning author who manages to sell their first novel is lucky to get $5,000 to $15,000 as an advance. She states in the posting that she believes, anecdotally, that her numbers are below the average NYT top twenty bestseller list, though.

She goes on to say that if she were like many writers and put out one novel with these kinds of sales per year and her family of four were dependent only on her income then she'd be making around $2,500 over poverty level. She'd be barely above the qualification for food stamps. OUCH!

I've made no bones that I'd love to be a successful author and move into that as a career. The reality is that while persistence and support could raise the odds of "making it" in such a career, or at least place it above winning the lottery, there is a very real possibility that it will only be a supplemental income (assuming it actually makes any income...)

I honestly don't know what the future will hold. There's a good chance my efforts will result in no payoff. There's smaller odds that my efforts will pay off in just enough to go out to dinner to celebrate that it actually sold. There's a very very slim chance that I'll manage to write enough books to actually get angry that the government is taking most of the advance in taxes. Odds that float around somewhere near the planet Krypton lay the chances that I could actually quit my day job and follow my dream of a home office in which I spend my days writing.

No matter the odds, I swore I'd give this an honest try to sell it. So here goes nothing!

Mostly Through NaNoWriMo Already...

2009-11-18T07:37:00.000-05:00

I've mentioned the National Novel Writing Month, also called NaNoWriMo. Now that we're more than halfway through the month it means that if you're pacing yourself out, you should be over the 25,000 word mark, since by midnight of the last day in November you need 50,000 words to "win".

I am not doing NaNoWriMo because I started working on my own manuscript in September, and currently have a wordcount of 83,604 words; if I stopped to try competing in NaNoWriMo (the manuscript must be started from scratch on November 1st) I'd have lost my momentum for the work I'm trying to finish.

I try to get a little further on my work each day rather than hit a specific word count since I may become discouraged when I miss the count. I was curious, though, how I would have stacked up if I were competing. So I went back through some numbers I had recorded to get an approximate number of words I had added since November first, and I hit a not-to-bad 20,000 words!

Not bad, I think. I'd be only slightly behind if I were competing.

How are other people doing? Even if you're behind, the goal is to make progress. There are no penalties for not making the wordcount. If you're ahead, keep going! If you're lagging, don't give up!

First Novel Update: November 15th: Weekends Are Hard On Progress

2009-11-15T20:30:00.000-05:00

First draft word count according to OpenOffice: 80,391. I officially broke the 80,000 word barrier!

Too bad this wasn't a NaNoWriMo novel...

The bad news was that I only managed 909 words today. Yesterday was a bust; I spent an insane amount of time at a really cool book sale in a warehouse (already blogged about it yesterday) and...what else? Oh, yeah, blogging after I got home last night, and spending some time with my son post-shopping while watching his rented Underdog DVD and playing on the Wii and playing with trains and...you get the idea.

So it was a mixed weekend. I don't regret how my Saturday went despite not making progress on the novel. Today I didn't hit my optimistic 1,000 words, but then again my set goal is 500 words a day and I managed to make some headway. Even 100 words is 100 more than was there before.

It seems that my word count tends to go down on weekends. I don't know why exactly other than my routine for the past five days is interrupted and I have less structure on my weekends than the days I slog through my workday.

The important thing is to continue working each day and continue making progress. Tobias Buckell wrote about the issue here on his blog; if you take a significant break on writing a novel, you lose all momentum. You remember less of the events in the story, you lose the workflow, you lose track of things...and you lose the excitement that drives the story forward, and boy oh boy is it a chore to get back into the story when this happens.

In reflection, I was disappointed that I didn't make as much progress as I would have liked to over the weekend, but I am happy that I made some progress. Big or small, progress is the key!

Penguin Publisher's Giant Warehouse Sale!

2009-11-14T20:59:00.000-05:00

I just got back from a rather interesting event; the Penguin Group held their annual warehouse sale where you can purchase new titles for as low as a $1!

First...quick update. Currently my first draft is at 79,492 words. I haven't worked on it yet today because I was at the book sale...

Now for the warehouse sale. The sale took place in an old warehouse. Sounds like the opening for a book, doesn't it?

I've heard horrible things about the literacy rates in America. A tiny percent of Americans read for pleasure anymore; book sales have fallen, staff are being cut from publishers and from what I can find it's harder than ever for new authors to get a contract.

But you wouldn't know that if you were at the sale today.

The line actually wound around the parking lot. Of a warehouse.

We waited an hour just to get in to the warehouse.

Once inside it was packed. Racks and racks of books priced at a huge discount over the cover price. There is simply no way I can imagine that the publisher was making any money on these things.

My wife and I ended up spending $68 on books, and we estimated that these were $400 worth of books (we haven't counted up the cover prices, but considering that any books listed over $60 were %10 of the price, that's probably not too far off). We packed a suitcase with various titles.

Literally. we packed a rolling suitcase with books. You have to carry boxes that they had at the entrance or you could fill a kid's wagon or hand cart or whatever you have handy. They didn't have anything other than boxes; no shopping carts or baskets.

Once inside we found cardboard "aisle signs" directing you to vague sections like young adult and adult titles. It was Black Friday in there; as the warehouse got full they would shut the doors and the line outside would stall for another ten minutes before they would admit more shoppers.

The aisles were crowded; we shuffled through, trying to check out the titles and decide what we may have shelf space for. At those prices it was hard not to grab books to try; even if we didn't need it, there are always people for whom they would make nice gifts.

Leaving was also a challenge since the line to get out took an hour.

But it was worth it.

Check out the link at the beginning of the post for information on the event. It is certainly an event to behold. My question is, with such horrible horrible news coming out about the publishing industry and the general state of American ignorance and unwillingness to read, why were there so many people literally flocking to this warehouse sale?

Could it be the extreme bargains? Is the media overhyping the bad news? Was this a congregation of the small percent of people in the area that do enjoy reading and collecting books? Or is there something about cutting the price down to iTunes-like proportions that makes people show up in droves to get books?

My only complaint was there weren't any graphic novels or technology books to choose from. Then again this wasn't Barnes and Noble; they had what they had, and hey, we left with a suitcase of books for under $70. Good enough for me!

First Novel Update: November 11th: Thoughts About Dialog

2009-11-11T20:01:00.000-05:00

My first draft is currently at 75,764 words according to the word count on OpenOffice.

I have been writing quite a bit of dialog in this story (big surprise). Part of the issue with this is that it's not always easy to write "realistic" dialog.

As someone with Asperger's I already notice certain details in people's speech. Primarily because there are certain things...verbal tics, if you will...that drive me NUTS.

I hate people saying "umm" or "uh". Can't stand it, and refuse to listen to public speakers that stammer constantly.

Or people that use taglines in their speech like "or whatever."

Or...well, I could go on. But I won't. Because the point is that dialog written in books isn't like dialog that we use in everyday speech. In real life we clip our words, use filler language, and use words that don't really contribute to the advancement of the plot. Probably because our lives are viewed as having plots while generally a novel is supposed to have a plot.

I'm not going to go back and edit for that quite yet but this is a topic that I have to keep in mind when editing time rolls around. I'll need to review a list like this one from fictionwriting.about.com that gives some helpful hints on how to trim dialog so it's readable and...well, readable.

In general dialog should read as if it were being said by real people in an actual conversation, but at the same time should be trimmed of excess verbiage and filler that doesn't serve to advance the plot or emphasize some aspect of the character.

If you have a character that is supposed to be dumb, then you'll end up doing things like adding pauses and "um" and "y'all"; something that many people do in normal course without being dumb, but when it's emphasized in the written form, you turn it into a characteristic of a personal stereotype despite the fact that these things are quite common in everyday folks. Characters that are supposed to be intelligent sometimes show it through excess or complex verbiage that nearly talks over the heads of the readers (but hopefully not completely over their heads or who would want to read that? Authors do still need audiences, after all...)

It's a complex thing to do, creating that balance between authentic dialog and dialog that isn't so transcribed that the reader has to slog through the words and get bored out of their skulls. I don't know if I have any skill with this because I'm still in the first draft; I'm focusing on just getting a basic story completed before I go back and evaluate the dialog.

Personally the only thing that has stuck out to me is that I think I ask too many questions in the dialog. In my head I really see the characters saying this and as I'm working on it I see these conversations coming out this way. I think maybe...just maybe...I am more into getting information by asking questions and don't know if people really do this in real life as much as I do. The first read (which is to say what I'm hearing in my head as I type) sounds fine.

I won't know until I go back to edit, I suppose. Or I have my first reader come back to me with some feedback on the dialog.

That's my reoccurring fear for now; my dialog is either too contrived or not varied enough to sound realistic. But it's a worry to focus on later. Right now I need to get back to writing.

Getting Good at Something

2009-11-09T07:33:00.032-05:00

I found this interesting tidbit of motivation (anti-motivation?) at the zenhabits blog. It's called, "The Only Way to Become Amazingly Great at Something."

We are a society that is fixated on the idea of being on the move. We never have time for anything. We rush through our day with one task after another with little thought to what could or should be done, just what we must get done.

This same society that values rushing so very much has devalued the art of learning. We want quick fixes; we recoil at the thought of having to actually spend time enhancing our skills. Bookshelves, as pointed out in the article, have a healthy population of books promising to master programming languages and skills in a month's time.

But to truly master something it takes more time. Far more. People who take the shortcuts show their shortcomings the moment they run into someone who has already learned this lesson.

The post outlines what it may take to be great at something. Seeing the estimated journey outlined in stark black and white is daunting to say the least, and more than a little scary.

But then I remember what Randy Pausch said (as quoted on this website, from his Last Lecture):

Brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want something badly enough. They are there to keep out the other people.
- Randy Pausch ( 1960-2008 )

Writing...becoming an author...maybe my fear in failing to achieve that goal is my brick wall. I have every reason to give up. The hardest part is keeping the reason to keep going in view.

First Novel Update: November 8th

2009-11-08T23:00:00.000-05:00

Ironically it seems that my weekend sees a drop in word count. We took my daughter out college touring yesterday so we spent most of our time on the road; combined yesterday and today, I added 925 words to the first draft of the manuscript.

That brought the total up to 73,102 words as of tonight.

I'm tired and at the moment want to start unwinding before facing the next workday. I need to get to bed and I keep coughing like something is stuck in my throat. Annoying!

I have read more and more material about what it's like to try to transition into a career in writing. It's not a pleasant picture; I'll probably blog more thoughts and discovery as time goes on, and a progress update on the state of the novel isn't the right place to put such things, right?

Anyway...weekend = lower word count, but I still made headway. That's what's important. Butt in seat. Fingers on keyboard. Words on...screen...

Author Yearly Income, and First Author Advances

2009-11-08T16:16:00.001-05:00

With my other worries involved in trying to write a first novel I sometimes try to picture what would happen if I actually did sell a manuscript. What kind of windfall could I expect? Will I be able to make the bills and mortgage payment, so I could quit my day job? Or will I be able to afford that helicopter pad in the backyard? Or will I instead be lucky to afford a kiddie pool for the backyard?

It's terribly difficult to get solid numbers due to the factors that affect the amount a first time author can receive. Agents tend to get higher advances for authors (but they take a cut). Publishers sometimes only take agented queries, so you may need to acquire an agent before making it into the "big time". Genre selection affects income as well as what topics are "hot" (Probably too late to start writing that novel about a vampire fighting a werewolf for the love of Mary Sue...by the time it gets into the queue to be published, mummy romance will be the next big thing, unless you're writing about a vampire wizard fighting a werewolf wizard who-shall-not-be-named...)

Being an author today is very much a business of branding yourself. From what I can find a new author is expected to bootstrap him or herself, drumming up their own popularity and online following, touring bookstores on their own dime...following a career path in writing is very much a labor of love that unless you are a fortunate lucky stars-smile-upon-you soul who hits the mega big time is going to take a lot of hard knocks along the way.

The averages I found? A 2005 survey done online by Tobias Buckell said $5,000. I found some statistics saying that yearly income is in the $10,000 to $12,000 range.

Ouch.

This means that most likely I'm not going to hit a jackpot. It means that if I want to be successful at this "writing thing" I will need to keep trying. It means that I need to remind myself of Mur Lafferty's rules of writing and that it's okay to suck. I may even need to face the possibility that this side project won't ever amount to much and I'm pouring an hour a day or more into a project that will cost me...well, a portion of my life I won't get back.

On the other hand the same could be said of much of the TV I've absorbed in my life.

Maybe this will be a long exercise in keeping perspective.

Consumer vs. Producer...Thoughts on Legacy

2009-11-05T22:51:00.002-05:00

What do you want out of life?

I've thought about this since I've undergone surgery to give myself the final kick-in-the-arse to lose my excess weight. If I'm going to live longer, shouldn't I have a good reason for it?

I did it in part because I have a young son and realized that as the comorbidities...diabetes, apnea, etc...mounted on my list of ailments then the odds of me living long enough to embarrass him in front of a potential wife were growing shorter. He's not yet in kindergarten and my list of issues from the doctor's visits were getting as long as he is tall.

But living just to hopefully see something eighteen years down the road isn't much of a good reason to live in itself, I think. Stress from work makes those 18 years...if I stay with that job...a very good reason to just allow my body to degenerate into a pile of convulsing bubbles of angst.

I decided that I wanted to leave a mark on the world. As an individual chances are I won't make a huge change. The vast majority of people don't. They live, they sweat, they toil, they die, and if they have children, they pass on genes to another generation and hopefully they'll be remembered for the next two or three generations in some way by their family.

I decided I wanted more than that. I had a child. He might remember me as an important influence on his life. Hopefully. The stepdaughter...she's a teenager. I don't know if she'd acknowledge my existence unless it suits something she needs. I'm told it's a teenager thing.

So how could I make some kind of footprint out there?

I started this blog initially as a record of the surgery. It's become kind of a sanitized (read: cleaned up...I constantly question my sanity) version of some of my views and issues in life. I figured my little dude, my wife, and perhaps even the teenager could have something to look back on and think about as being an extension of me.

Aside-I'll admit that part of me is saddened that a teenager that can sit and read an entire Twilight novel in the span of five hours would rather play an online video game for several hours than take three minutes a day to read my own little ramblings on the web...but again...guess that's a teenager thing. I hope.

I also started journaling at the behest of my insurance-mandated-for-surgery psychologist. I'm still surprised at the stack of papers pouring from the printer when I am prepping for another visit. My next printer will need to handle double-sided printing, and at a minimum I'm going to need more binders to hold them all soon.

I decided that I wanted to try my hand at one of two things (since I didn't think I'd be good at trying both at once): writing a novel, or writing software.

The software would be a challenge because I haven't programmed, really, since college. I'm in my early thirties now. I would dream of working in an environment like Fog Creek Software (if you haven't looked up how Spolsky treats his programmers...OH...MY...GOD...HIS company is a model of respect towards employees. It is a true dream job.) A true dream come true would be to START a company with a good software product. Work from home, distribute over the web...hmm...warm dreams.

The novel is a challenge because...well, face the reality. I don't have an English degree. You toil and toil for months writing the draft, then editing, and editing again, and perhaps again, then shopping for an agent, then finding a publisher (if you ever find an agent), then a year or two later you might be a published author and all you have to show for it is a piddly advance and if you have poor sales you may not see that publisher again. Ouch. And at any stage that career path can be derailed. Most authors don't quit their day jobs. Not to mention that America is largely illiterate; people don't read for leisure anymore (on average). The publishing industry isn't handing out sweet deals to unknowns anymore; the bubble there burst. If you see a "big thing" on the shelves like vampire stories have been (thanks a lot, Twilight) then decide to write the next big vampire novel, guess what? Unless you're an established author with a fast track into the publishing line, when your novel comes out everything will be mummies. You can't get a novel churned out quickly enough to hit the current wave of popularity.

Most novel writers never make it big. They're lucky to make a living.

I turned this over in my head. I decided that I really had the least to lose in trying to write a novel. I am inspired by the likes of Scott Sigler (who worked for 15 freakin' years before throwing in the towel and deciding to podcast his novels for free...leading to an actual publishing contract. Finally!) and Mur Lafferty (who also got a publishing contract after working her butt off on projects like I Should Be Writing and her own novels being released in podcast form) and Paula B. with her podcast The Writing Show, giving insights on the publishing and writing industries.

I didn't mention the worst part of taking this path. I fully realize that I'm working about an hour or more a day on a story that may never sell and will get rejected. When you work on something that could be about 100,000 words (mine's currently at 40,000 as a first draft, and this post is appearing several weeks after I'm prepping this posting) along with the work it takes to edit and polish the manuscript, those rejection slips from agents and publishers is going to hurt.

Having a story in your head and thinking that you have what it takes to write a great novel is one thing. In your head you can do anything. But to actually try...and fail...that's tough. I am essentially making the conscious choice to invest months of my time into something that may do little more than confirm that I'm going to fail.

Ouch!

But I'm producing something. (Bet you were wondering when I'd get to the point, eh?)

I'm working on a legacy. I see teenagers who spend most of their time texting, playing games, and watching TV. The big thing in schools now is creating a portfolio of work; very rarely do I see anything that they produce willingly on their own. Their portfolio is filled with assignments, things that curriculum dictates they work on so they'll have something to show later on. Nothing with their heart or passion defining some part of themselves in the process.

I am producing something that I wished I had growing up. I know very little about my parents as they grew up. Their memories now are selective. I have things in my journal that hopefully will only be read when I'm too far senile to care what others close to me hold as an opinion. But it's there.

I want to have things for my kids to refer to later on and know this is what Dad was like. Really. Well, not the incident involving jello wrestling during the fraternity/sorority mixer. But what is in that journal and is in this blog is me put into a more lasting form for posterity.

If I do through some miracle happen to get published as a novelist, or (dare I say it?) become successful enough to become a full-time writer, I'll be listed in the Library of Congress and available in bookstores for my children to be able to point and say, "That's your grandfather, son!"

It makes me sad sometimes. I look around and wonder if other people ever think about leaving a legacy behind. I see them more concerned about fashion or reality TV shows than thinking about trying to make a little movie for fun, or blogging their thoughts for the world, or creating artwork that even if it only makes it onto the walls of the bedroom is still something that can be a reminder that "I was here. I mattered. I made that."

"But what about sites like YouTube? Or Facebook?"

I suppose that at the most base level those are examples of producing material. But I don't see it necessarily as that.

The barriers to entry for things like podcasting, video production and blogging have never been lower. Never. You can get a cheap camera for $200 bucks that fits in your pocket. You can get a computer for $500 on which to edit the videos, and an account on YouTube to upload your resulting masterpiece for free.

The difference in my view is that there's a difference between some tweener capturing ten seconds of their friend falling on her giggly ass or adding the three hundredth lipsync of the latest music abomination on the radio to YouTube and finding something that took time and care to produce like this trailer for Scott Sigler's novel Contagious.

Basically I see a producer as someone creating something of pride; it is a work that they have put a part of themselves into as a way of putting the best representation of their skills forward.

This blog isn't exactly the top-notch in grammar or structure. Much of it is just rambling from a guy trying not to be fat. But it is honest. It is a facet of insight into a part of me. The same goes for the journal. The novel is a story that I wanted to tell. Keeping up with the journal, the blog, the novel, and my job right now fills most of my time, so I don't have as much to try my hand at making videos, or doing theater work, or polishing my programming skills or working on a podcast.

But I am producing.

Perhaps I'm just fixated on the wrong goals in life. I get depressed watching others doing things that in a day or two will likely mean nothing, leaving behind nothing as a legacy. Maybe that suits them so it isn't anything to grieve for. Maybe they're happy filling their expected roles as consumers.

What do you think? Do you have an opinion on this? Do you want to leave behind some kind of legacy and if so how?

What's My Audience?

2009-11-05T17:52:00.000-05:00

As I write my story I sometimes stop and wonder if the story I'm telling will have appeal, or at least appeal to the audience I intended it to appeal to.

My primary goal is to sit down and get the words to the page, a little each day. Whether it's 500 words or 2,000, I need to get a little further into the story and keep the momentum up. I figure I can smooth the rough spots in rewrite/editing.

Since my primary goal is to get the story advanced a little each day I find I'm more focused on telling my story than fitting it into a specific criteria. The story is more or less, in my evaluation, a modern-day science fiction story. So...sci fi, right?

Maybe. The thing is that I worry my story is too simplistic. Too straightforward, maybe. That leads me to wonder if it isn't Young Adult sci-fi.

Which would be bad. It's pushing 70,000 words now (69,937 at the moment, give or take) and YA novels are in the 50 to 80 thousand word range. Mine will most likely be pushing 100 thousand, give or take.

So what to do? Is it even worth worrying about at this stage?

If I keep second guessing myself I think I'll stutter and lose my momentum or at a minimum lose the story that I'm trying to tell. So I figure the best thing to do is continue with the story and see if the turd at the end is something that can be polished, then worry about how to summarize and pitch and query it.

Unless someone else knows of a better way...that's my course of action. Finish story and worry later. Yeah.

(Does anyone know a good "litmus test" for a story to tell what genre and subgenre it would fit into, like whether this story will be best a sci-fi or YA sci-fi story?)

Writing My First Novel

2009-11-04T19:53:00.000-05:00

This is more appropriately titled "Writing My First Novel's Manuscript". The odds are stacked way way against being published, so while I think my story is okay, it's still a first effort and I have no illusions that it will be the next Harry Potter.

It would be nice, but I really doubt it would happen.

I figured that seeing as this was supposed to be hints and tips and information about writing, I should probably post some updates once in awhile to what I'm working on. My first manuscript is currently listing in OpenOffice as having 68,918 words and no it's not finished.

The story is a current day science fiction story. My goal is to have at least 500 words a day added to the first draft; my typical word count average has been over 1,000 words a day, so I've been happy with that progress. Some days are worse; I've had times where I was so tired I added a couple hundred words and fell asleep. Other days were fantastic. Today, for example, I added 2,599 words so far, and am contemplating hiding in the bedroom with the laptop to see if I could pound out a few more words and get a little further on the story arc.

It will still need heavy editing, of course. And parts will probably benefit from a rewrite. The way I figure it, the hardest part is actually getting the story down so I'd have something to edit.

Hopefully the finished product will be good enough to polish. The only way to tell is to finish it and start editing, right?

I Should Be Writing and NaNoWriMo

2009-11-04T19:05:00.000-05:00

Episode 135 of Mur Lafferty's I Should Be Writing podcast is all about the NaNoWriMo. She interviews a big name author that actually supports doing NaNoWriMo, David Niall Wilson, the big guy that started NaNoWriMo, Chris Baty, and a writer that is extremely prolific and has accepted a challenge to write 50,000 words in 21 days (he's aiming for 100,000 words for November) and with his prior track record will probably make his goal, Nathan Lowell.

This is a special podcast dedicated to all things NaNoWriMo. If you're participating I'd strongly suggest checking it out!

Word Count for Novels

2009-11-03T18:49:00.000-05:00

As I try to draft my first novel's manuscript I try to pay close attention to information whatever information I can get on the "right" way to do things in the publishing world.

I found a recent post by Jessica on the BookEnds LLC blog regarding approximate word counts for novels. Basically, when in doubt, aim for 80,000 words.

She broke it down further in the post, by thousands of words;
Mystery: 70-90
Romance: 80 to 100
Fantasy/Scifi: 80 to 125
Young Adult: 50 to 75
Women's Fiction, literary fiction, etc.: 80 to 100 (literary fiction can be 125)

This pretty much fit in with the numbers I'd found previously. My aim (the manuscript I'm drafting now is a present-day science fiction story) is around 100,000 words. I'm currently at 64,000 words and working towards the climax.

The thing is that these are rules of thumb. From what I can tell if you have a good story, one that is compelling and pulls the reader in, you have a chance of getting it sold to an agent and/or publisher, unless you go WAY outside of the limits. If the numbers are off your agent/editor will have you alter the story to fit their needs for publication.

If I remember right this was a problem for J.C. Hutchin's 7th Son trilogy. He wrote a 300,000 word monster and then couldn't sell it to publication houses he pitched to...because it was too long. Way too long. He eventually broke it into a trilogy and podcast it for the masses rather than admit defeat and trash the manuscript, which in the end was a good thing because after a long road he got a publishing contract for book one.

Hope the information here was useful to you!

Publishing Is Changing: Giving Away Your Content?

2009-11-03T06:28:00.000-05:00

Mur Lafferty posted a blog entry to Storytellers Unplugged about her view on the changing winds in the publishing industry. She is a podcast author that has given away much of her content in an effort to grow an audience, and as a result has become a published author for her Playing for Keeps novel. I became a fan of hers after hearing the first of her Heaven novel series.

She discusses how publishers could be taking some lessons from those who are on the forefront of this change in the industry; struggling new authors like her are focusing on growing an audience through free content. Larger audience means more people have heard of you, more people hearing of you means more sales. It's worked pretty well for names like Scott Sigler, Cory Doctorow, J.C. Hutchins, and of course Mur Lafferty.

There could be a flip side to this too. These are people who aren't just authors. They're promoters and marketers. They are learning how to brand themselves. For example, Scott Sigler isn't just a podcast author. He's a brand that promotes himself as the FDO, the Future Dark Overlord. His fans are self-branded Junkies that need their Sigler 'fix. He tirelessly puts out content into his feed, including the Bloodcast, short stories that are leading to other stories and novels, and he has written most of his released work in a way that they tie together like a more overt version of the Stephen King works that make subtle nods to one another across novels (for the FDO there are hints that aliens in the Rookie have made multiple appearances in novels like Infected and Contagious, for example, and there's a shared character name in the Rookie that is a descendant of a certain hornball in Nocturnal...) Sigler has also recently concluded his tour around parts of the country while holding Junkie contests to determine where he goes next in order to draw crowds.

Most people who want to be authors want to write. What Mur seems to be pointing to is a future where that may not be really possible except for the really fortunate authors; publishers expect authors to brand themselves and promote themselves rather than investing in the author. This picture is saying that a career as a writer is as dead as becoming a teacher.

I have relatives that are teachers. They can't be just teachers as they thought teaching would be when they went to college. Instead teachers become mentors, surrogate parents, guidance counselors, psychologists, babysitters, hall monitors, politicians, and students having to complete "continuing education" credits. The idea that you go to school to learn about a topic and then go out to mold young minds is complete bull. It seems that actually teaching fills about thirty percent of their day. The rest is unrelated politics and crud that people outside the field have no clue about and people inside the field know burns out most new teachers within the first few years.

Indeed in the future painted by that blog post authors will need to focus on building an audience, interacting with their audience, updating websites and twitter accounts and facebook pages and podcasts and cross promoting with others in the podcast community. The new wave of authors will need to be savvy in using tools like the Internet to track their Google ranking and set up notifications when their names appear online so they can move to other blogs where people mention their names and interact with potential audience members on other blogs.

And this may work for many. The problem is that I see this through a myopic lens; I am a podcast freak who likes listening to audio on the iPod and have discovered some of these authors like Mur and Sigler. As a result I get a lot of my information from this insular community for whom this approach to gaining sales works. They are author/marketers.

I can't help but think there are others who want to just be authors that won't be able to do this. In the comments for that blog, a commenter with the name Joe Cottonwood posted that he podcast 3 books on podiobooks for free but already has 9 books in print with major houses. He said that he has increased his audience by a huge number and has had great fan mail and he really enjoyed going back to storytelling roots by doing the podcast. But he hasn't seen much in the way of sales being generated; his podcast of Clear Heart had about 10,000 listeners and the book sold about 200 copies, according to his comments. "One problem, of course, is that I suck at marketing. Apparently I’m a pretty good writer and a popular podcaster, but I’m a terrible publicist. I can live with that."

I appreciate Mur and Sigler's advice to new authors. To paraphrase, "Write your book. Just plant your butt in the seat and write. Clean it up. Try everything you can to get an agent and get it published the traditional route. Podcasting your content for free isn't for the faint of heart and should be a last resort." They aren't giving up entirely on the old way of publishing but rather are acting as pioneers on a new approach to doing things at a time when the traditional houses are starting to see a storm on the horizon and in the process authors will end up having to roll with the punches or change careers.

Will the podcaster-free-content-author-turned-marketer become the norm? Only time will tell. In the meantime it looks like the curse of living in "interesting times" is coming and everyone in the industry will be waiting to see just how interesting things get.

Authors Are Expected to be Marketers

2009-11-02T07:17:00.000-05:00

I'm not published. Hopefully it's more accurate to say that I'm not published yet. But I do spend some time trying to get a feel for what it takes to move from unknown wanna-be author to published (and income-generating) author.

One theme that is being visited and revisited is that an author's publisher is not going to spend money on publicizing new books. They do the bare minimum and that's it.

Unless, of course, you're a sure bet.

What does this mean? It means a few things. One, publishing houses will spend tons of money on authors that are guaranteed to bring in money. The flip side is that the authors that really need support in getting word out about their book and don't have the financial means to do so will get zilch help.

Second, authors are expected to market themselves. I've been finding more and more online articles like this one and it's rather disconcerting. Authors aren't expected to just be authors; they have to market themselves, brand themselves, grow a following, nurture their fans...oh, yeah, and write a book.

Stephen King, Stephanie Meyers, JK Rowling...the big name authors have no problem getting someone else to foot the bill if they wanted to go on a tour or appear in public to drum up publicity. Ironically they have a following that is already gossiping about release schedules and probably have no problem selling their latest works even if they did nothing to promote the release at all.

New authors today need to create a web site, interact on forums, appear in bookstores on tours often sponsored by themselves, and grow the thick skin to accept those times where they spend an entire day sitting alone in a Barnes and Noble making maybe two sales of their book because the people coming in have no idea who they are.

The fact is that publishers often aren't making back the advance they pay authors for their books. They would rather bet on the known rather than the unknown. So when they accept a new author, they're essentially paying for the gamble that your book will somehow, miraculously, create the next JK Rowling.

New authors, beware. If you want to be an author you need to explore a path that may include writing the manuscript, editing it, fixing it up, finding an agent, shopping it around to publishers, creating a website, interacting on forums, actively engaging your audience, touring bookstores (on your dime), appearing in podcasts for interviews, creating promotional blurbs for podcasts, interviewing in newspapers, and creating trailers on YouTube for viewing as well as storm through other social media outlets your audience may be lurking in like Facebook and Twitter.

Oh, yeah, and you need to try working on the next novel in there somewhere as well...

Not a pleasant thought, but if you really want to become an author, it's time to steel up and get prepared!

Becoming Batman

2009-10-30T06:49:00.001-04:00

I thought with Halloween coming up tomorrow this blog posting would be somewhat topical. I just finished a book called Becoming Batman by Dr. E. Paul Zehr.

This isn't really a book on creating a costume so you can go out and have some actual fun with tricks when you don't get treats.

Wow...that sounded wrong.

This book is about the feasibility of training yourself to become Batman. Batman is unique among the superhero genre in that he doesn't have magic powers, he doesn't have alien superpowers (like a well-known Kryptonian), and he didn't get any of his powers from a freak accident or by tempting the fates by playing God or any other origin story posed as a moral. He was a kid who was screwed up at the injustice of seeing his parents murdered.

He trained himself to the peak of athletic perfection, training his body.

He studied the arts, forensic science, martial arts...training his mind.

Then he pursued his inner demons by ridding Gotham City of criminals. Seeking justice.

He was an ordinary man. His powers came from gadgets purchased from his millionaire holdings in Wayne Industries and his physical prowess came from hard work.

(Sure, some will bring up Iron Man, Marvel's answer to Batman, but this is about a man that gained his talents through hard training, not technology. Although for the record I think Iron Man still rocks and is quite possibly still better than most of the Batman franchise.)

Batman's history is, of course, subject to some editing and revision over history. A great summary is here.

Aaaand thus ends the history lesson. The book was an uneven read in my opinion. It presents excellent information on physiology and training and exercise, and the author carries a "Dr." in his title as well as being a martial artist. He presents information on topics such as hardening bones and the biology behind it; basically the structure of the bone gains microfractures, and in the process of "healing" they get stronger. He gives an overview of a technique that some martial arts masters had used and he had once tried that basically amounted to "hitting something really hard 1000 times a day until you hurt like a !@# and wait for it to heal"...a tree, a wall, a thin pad on a concrete wall are all good. And it works. I remembered reading outside this book that Bruce Lee (if you don't know him...you don't have any interest in martial arts) used to punch buckets of stones hundreds of times a day to harden his skin and bones in his hands. The author tried a similar technique and found that while it does work, it also seemed to damage nerves in his hands because his fingertips began to tingle, which interfered with some of his day job duties at the keyboard.

There was information on sleep deprivation, effects of aging, muscle growth, even physical stresses and how it affects the body.

The problem I had were relatively minor. First, the book is called "Becoming Batman". But it's not a how-to. It's more of an overview of whether it's possible to train to become someone like Batman. And he gives an answer. But if you're looking for an overview of what you would have to do to become a physical specimen of athletic perfection like Mr. Wayne, you're not going to find it here. If you want to know what your bones are made of at the cellular level, this is perfect for you.

Second the book read more like a physiology lesson given by a comic-obsessed nerd. Which is okay given that this is a book about Batman. But it wasn't really written focusing on Batman. It was focusing on the body and how attempting to train it to a condition like Batman's body would affect it while being sprinkled liberally with Batman references. It's like reading a book about how to send men to the moon with references to Battlestar Galactica thrown in, sans Cylons (We'd need armor plating made of ___ ___ inches thick to withstand the radiation of space while traveling en route to the moon, just like Galactica repelled nuclear blasts during the attack on the colonies! Okay, bad reference, but that's the gist of the feeling I got).

In the end this could have been a good book on the affects of training your body even if the Batman references were removed. It wasn't a bad read but it isn't on my gotta-gotta save shelf either. I'll probably pass it on to someone else who might benefit from the information. Any fans out there interested? Let me know.

Novel Fears

2009-10-28T18:18:00.003-04:00

I wrote already that I'm working on a draft of a novel. It's progressing...but there are fears.

I'm averaging something like 700 to 1100 words a day on the draft. Then it would need a second pass to clean it up. Then I pass it to my editor-wife who actually knows something about things like grammar and punctuation. Then probably another pass or two. Assuming that the feedback doesn't point it in the direction of the garbage can, I would probably either start an agent or publisher hunt or find an editor for hire with more experience in the field of publishing and see if they can polish it up for an affordable fee.

But there's always doubt.

I'm dedicating probably an hour and a half to two hours a day on it. It's not perfect and I don't think of myself as a professional writer (my wife asked me when I'd stop thinking that way and I said, "When someone hands me a check in exchange for the manuscript and says they'd like to see more for another check, that's when!)

I try to remain realistic. The vast majority of writers never make it through the slush piles. Many writers, including some famous ones, collect hundreds of rejections before finding the first break.

I hear horror stories like the ones in the (current as of this writing) ISBW podcast episode talking with an editor from tor.com. They say science fiction just isn't selling now...yikes! Big publishers are in trouble due to the economy (and probably because most Americans don't read)...they are hesitant to have new writers into the scene when the moneymakers are the established authors...the list goes on and on. The podcast goes on to mention that beginners writing most likely does suck, and it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill like writing. Triple yikes! It's very possible I'm laboring for something that no one will ever want and will never make any money, which is even scarier since I put off another venture in trying to program an application that might be a better money maker in the long run (although running a business is a jar of hurt unto itself, really).

So in the end I'm working rather hard on something that may never see the light of day.

I try to cheer myself up by saying, I'm not a professional writer. There's no slap to the ego or personal hit in trying this.

I see plenty of horror stories about wanna-be authors that blatantly break common sense rules in submitting manuscripts; they send horror stories to young adult-representing agents, or don't bother to follow an agent's preferences by using fancy fonts and colored paper and pretty pictures. Still others do no research on how to properly query an agent or publisher. Or they just write a first draft and send that out with hardly any attention paid to detail in spelling or grammar.

I'm not perfect in that regard; heck, this blog probably has broken most of the grammatical rules since its inception, but these are typed off the top of my head. I rarely go back and repair entries unless my wife finds something that makes her eyes bleed. I do these so far in advance that when she asks about it I usually don't remember what she's referring to.

I really wish there were statistics somewhere regarding writers and publishing for relevant information I could use to not be so anxious about this dipping of the toes into the water. Sure, 95% (making that up...probably close though...) of people trying to get published are rejected. Maybe only .05% get a fat contract that lets them quit the day job and focus on their love of writing. But how many of the 95% were writing pure crap? Or never even heard of Standard Manuscript Format?

How many fit into my spectrum of skill (or lack thereof) and still get rejected? I want to filter out the people that make the mistakes I am trying to avoid. Would it skew into my favor then?

All I can do is keep plugging away and hope for the best...

NaNoWriMo!

2009-10-28T18:12:00.000-04:00

In a scant three days is National Novel Writing Month!

Shortened to NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month is a fun way to try jump starting the novelist in you by writing a 50,000 word novel (about 175 pages) between November 1st and midnight on November 30th.

That's roughly 1,667 words a day.

This isn't to write a masterpiece. It's not about a high quality story at all. This is about sitting down and writing. Fast. Hard. No editing. No rewriting. Just 50,000 words in a story.

You write it and then upload the story before the deadline for verification. You don't win anything more than a certificate and the knowledge of knowing that you have "won"...while it's easy to cheat, the people who do in this contest are really pitiful.

Another benefit lay in the act of writing each day. You gain some discipline in the act of setting a goal in word count and having to nail it each day to meet the goal. Sometimes novels that started from NaNoWriMo. For example, JC Hutchin's 7th Son started as a NaNoWriMo entry. At least, I believe that's what I heard in the "Get Published" podcast interview with J.C. The NaNoWriMo site has a list of some of the novels published as a result of participation in the festivities.

Now, of course there are detractors. NaNoWriMo focuses on setting goals and hitting deadlines, not refining the craft of writing. And perhaps these people who shake their heads in disappointment at the idea of NaNoWriMo have a point; it flies in the face of those who work hard at refining the craft of writing, reducing it to little more than a marathon with a line to be crossed rather than an art of telling a good story.

Personally if you're the kind of person that thrives on a deadline to accomplish a goal then NaNoWriMo isn't a bad thing. It might help encourage people to pursue their writing dreams. Is that necessarily bad?

There's no fee to enter. No penalty for "failing". Just sign up, write like crazy, and if you make it, you get a certificate. Let your inner novelist out to play a little.

(My wife is planning on trying to write 50,000 words this November. I'm not; I have a story I'm working on now, and part of the contest rules state you must start the novel on the first. Outlines, notes, etc. are okay beforehand, but the novel itself must start on the first, and I am not willing to suspend the story I'm working on now in order to start a new one for November and risk losing my momentum.)

SASE your Manuscript!

2009-10-27T18:08:00.000-04:00

For some reason I've been running into this advice a lot online recently.

If you query with part of your manuscript, it is vital that you include a self addressed stamped envelope. Apparently this is one of those things that is thought to be "common knowledge" in the trade, but much of the time new authors are oblivious to it and are thus rejected outright.

Worse, it's an automatic rejection flag in many agencies. Send something in without the SASE and they'll heap your entry into the trash. Yikes!

Here are some links to additional information regarding proper mailing etiquette for your manuscript:

SASE Guidelines

The Logic - and Illogic - Behind the SASE

20 Tips for Writers

Scott Sigler's The Rookie

2009-10-26T18:51:00.004-04:00

Scott Sigler rocks.

I first was introduced to Sigler's work with his debut podcast novel called Earthcore. This totally free book was released as a podcast and was a rich blend of science fiction, science, thriller and horror. I. Was. Hooked.

He released other novels, all freely available online, like Ancestor, Infected, and Nocturnal. The following garnered by his audio novels enabled him to finally get a publishing contract while continuing work on followups to many of his titles (Contagious has already been released as the followup to Infected, and I'm STILL WAITING FOR EARTHCORE'S SEQUEL!); and like many of his fans I've purchased some of his work to give as gifts to support an author whose work I truly enjoyed.

But you know the neatest part?

Well, aside from his strong integration of science into his horror/scifi style, of course...

He had me enjoy a book that with every chapter released I thought, "I'll probably delete it soon..."

His story The Rookie is once again a thriller/science/scifi mix with a dash of mobsters and sports stirred into the pot. And I hate sports.

Here's the synopsis from his own website (linked above):
**********
Set in a lethal pro football league 700 years in the future, THE ROOKIE is a story that combines the intense gridiron action of "Any Given Sunday" with the space opera style of "Star Wars" and the criminal underworld of "The Godfather."

Aliens and humans alike play positions based on physiology, creating receivers that jump 25 feet into the air, linemen that bench-press 1,200 pounds, and linebackers that literally want to eat you. Organized crime runs every franchise, games are fixed and rival players are assassinated.

Follow the story of Quentin Barnes, a 19-year-old quarterback prodigy that has been raised all his life to hate, and kill, those aliens. Quentin must deal with his racism and learn to lead, or he'll wind up just another stat in the column marked "killed on the field."
*********

I mean it. I can't tell a touchdown from a linebacker. "Third in ten" is like speaking Aramaic to me. If they're on the ten yard line I don't know if it's good or bad.

Despite thinking I was going to delete the chapter from my iPod until he would release more of something my style, like The Crypt, I listened to every chapter the bastard released. And I enjoyed the story.

For someone like me that's really saying something about the story.

More than that Sigler ties his stories together; The Crypt takes place in the Rookie universe. Aliens from The Rookie are hinted at in modern-day Infected. Like a sociopathic sci-fi Stephen King, the man makes his audience feel as if they're part of a greater story arch with inside references that newbies won't "get" until they're initiated into the Church of Sigler.

He's worked 15 years to reach that point in his craft. And he got pretty damn good at it.

Sigler is one of the big names in podcasting of novels. As a matter of fact he was one of the handful that inspired me to actually sit down and try writing a novel. Not because he made it look easy, but because he made me realize that maybe I had a story to tell. And he was frank about his own story in trying to get published and what the industry was like; there are no gummy bears or rainbows in his off-book stories (although if there were I'd bet that the gummy bears would wield the rainbows as weapons to slice your head off, and there'd be a feasible line of reasoning behind how they did it, too).

If you have ANY interest in horror and science, or just horror and science fiction, check out his stories. They're freely available. I dare you to not have the urge to purchase one of the print books after listening to even two of his books. The crossovers, the hard science, the fact that the man goes out of his way to connect with his audience...all this comes together into a perfect storm of entertainment. He's a pioneer on the ground floor of podcast novels. Grab your media player and download them TODAY!

What if I Fail?

2009-10-25T17:53:00.001-04:00

If you're like me you have had an idea or five tickling the back of your mind where you wanted to become a published author. The problem is that it's always tickled the back of your mind and never actually became a full story.

I found this article on Cracked.Com that may give some inspiration to overcome that fear. It lists 5 people who "failed" their way to fortune.

Usually I wouldn't find inspiration on Cracked.Com, a site largely dedicated to funny lists and satirical social commentary. But this list had an author named Amanda McKittrick Ros and I thought, "This would be a perfect first post topic on a new blog about my progress...or lack thereof...in trying to get published!" (there are other posts appearing "previous" to this...but those are migrated from another blog. This is the first "official" post to the NAC blog.)

From the Cracked article:
***
Amanda McKittrick Ros is believed by many to be one of the greatest bad writers who ever lived. How do you earn a distinction like that? You earn it by opening your novels with sentences like this...

"Have you ever visited that portion of Erin's plot that offers its sympathetic soil for the minute survey and scrutinous examination of those in political power, whose decision has wisely been the means before now of converting the stern and prejudiced, and reaching the hand of slight aid to share its strength in augmenting its agricultural richness?"
***

Her first novel, Irene Iddesleigh, was self-published by her husband as a gift. The book managed to gain a following that counted among the members C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, who publicised the book with a contest daring readers to see how far they could read it without bursting with laughter. Even Mark Twain commented on the book with a witticism.

Probably not how she meant to be known, but her books did gain readers and that is ultimately what an author wants. What's more, she managed to turn these successful failures into a career from which she made a decent living financially.

So I figure...if someone like this managed to break into being a published author...I must have some chance, right? Maybe slightly more than winning the lottery?

Music and Writing

2009-10-10T18:07:00.006-04:00

I was listening to the StackOverflow podcast (number 69) went over, among other things, the topic of programmers listening to music and some of Jeff and Joel's anecdotal evidence of how it affects programmers' concentration.

I am not a programmer. I did a little coding while in college, and while I probably should have considered staying in that track or something related to it I did not...I became a techy tech. But when it comes to listening to something that is potentially distracting while concentrating on something else, I do this quite a bit.

My Aspergian tendencies make me more comfortable when I'm not disturbed from what I'm concentrating on. Sometimes it doesn't work very well because we're always being distracted by people walking in, interrupting with questions totally unrelated to what I'm there to work on, or phone calls (the bane of any work environment, I think). I used to try listening to my iPod at times when I wasn't even supposed to be interacting with people but then I got into "trouble" because "someone" felt I was unapproachable when wearing headphones (um...wasn't that the rule to begin with?). So I was forced to return to the less efficient way of interacting with my routines with more interruptions.

That said, I have noticed that there are certain things that are impaired in unexpected ways when listening to my iPod. I know it's not music, per se, but rather it is basically listening to audio content while performing some other task. I normally listen to podcasts. StackOverflow. Pseudopod. I Should Be Writing. The Writing Show. Escape Pod. MacOS Ken. And more. Can you tell I love my podcasts? It's like my version of NPR. I've discovered that if I'm trying to do something like writing, concentrating on a repair to a system, basically anything that takes more than rote actions, I find I can't retain the information form the podcast. It's like parts of it just disappear from time...I can't recall anything for periods of the podcast.

Another observation. I am trying to write a first draft of a novel. My goal has been 500 words a day. My writing area is usually at my desk, which is in the living room near the TV and the family. It's a long story as to why it has ended up there, but this is about observations on listening to something while concentrating on another task. anyway, I when I'm at that desk trying to work on the story I usually end up doing this in the evening. I get distracted easily by conversations, the television, the four year old, and even the fidgeting of other people. (It's weird since Aspergians are supposed to be very focused on things, supposedly...).

To help isolate myself I put on a set of headphones and listen to a loop of music videos I fetched from YouTube. It's basically the same list I've heard many other times and once in awhile I'll add one or two more. The background noise helps me focus a little more. I typically get somewhere between 400 and 700 words after roughly an hour of work under these conditions.

If I go somewhere else and work in quiet for an hour, I've hit upwards 1,000 to 1,100 words or more on average.

This tells me that, for me, music or other sounds while concentrating on a task is a distraction. I'm not a neuroscientist, but as I recall the brain breaks tasks down and processes various tasks in ways that don't break down into what to us are logical units. Even when making sentences, bits and pieces, like the nouns, the verbs, the structure of the sentence coming out of your mouth...are pulled from different areas of the brain to be assembled in another part before erupting from your speak hole.

So I'm thinking that music or listening to audio content stimulates parts of the brain that otherwise are part of the creative process.

It doesn't seem so bad when listening to music that I've listened to a hundred times before. It's like once the brain has something imprinted and it's not something that is being operated on...analyzed, thought about, etc...then it is background noise that helps drown out some of the ambient noises. It obviously isn't completely unprocessed in the mind, but it does have different effects depending on how it is "memorized" or imprinted in memory.

There is obviously some disconnect that people have with perception vs. reality in dealing with distractions. Countless studies have shown that texting while driving, talking on the phone while driving, even eating while driving increase your chances dramatically of being involved in an accident. Yet hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people do this every day. I've often said that adults are really kids with bank accounts and more responsibilities...as much as many don't acknowledge it, adults have the same "it won't happen to me" attitude that idiot teenagers carry when taking irresponsible risks. I think adults quash some of the impulses...perhaps through experience their impulse control becomes a little more refined...but at heart, I know that people are still having that attitude poke through in different ways (like seeing someone reading the @#$ newspaper while driving down the freeway. If that isn't dangerous and irresponsible, I don't know what is.)

A huge number of people while say that XYZ helps them when in reality studies show that it's a distraction, or that they're actually being counterproductive. What it comes down to is that some people get into certain habits that they are comfortable with. For people like me, I need to try to isolate myself from distractions while concentrating on things that take deep or creative thought.

How about you? Have you noticed any affect from listening to something while concentrating on an unrelated task?

Novel Writing

2009-10-05T18:20:00.001-04:00

I chronicled my progress on entering The Writing Show's Halloween short story contest. What I haven't really discussed was that since I entered that contest I was working on a novel.

I think writing is one of those ideal jobs for people with my mental wiring. I kind of live in my head already. I have stories to try telling. I want to work alone, without having to get stressed by other people. Unfortunately the life of an author is seldom the life of the Stephen Kings in the world. Very few authors get to make a life of their writing; most do it as a side job or labor of love. And that's the small percentage that actually get published.

I've heard that an author is someone who manages to get published despite really knowing how the odds are stacked against them.

I want to get a book published. I wondered if I could manage to defy odds and get a novel out there, maybe get someone to read it and like it.

I'm not an English major. I can't accurately dissect sentences into parts of speech. I just wanted to see if I could tell a story in a compelling way, compelling enough to sell it to someone that would hand over a decent advance and say, "Hey, kid, how about you send me another manuscript and we'll see about getting it published a year after this one?"

But I was afraid. See, something like this is best kept in your head. My head was filled with stories. Great stories. Stories that would make you tingle with delight at the valor of heroes and gape in awe at the entrance of the starship that swoops in at the last moment to the riffs of Bonnie Tyler's "Holding Out For a Hero". Your head would explode from the sheer amount of awesome in my imagination.

Actually trying to get these things on paper was another story. In my head, I am successful. I am great, as a matter of fact. To actually try it...that's putting yourself out there. It's a way to perhaps validate that I'm a failure. One of the only things I thought I could do as an alternative to the stresses I currently live with in my current job would be finally acknowledged as a non-alternative.

But I still toyed with the idea. I listen to I Should Be Writing. I listen to The Writing Show. Both give inspiration for wanna-be writers. I started reading magazines aimed at writers with tips on how to create decent characters and plots and how to avoid common pitfalls in beginner's writings.

After the contest entries I sat down and started working on a story. I'm near the 25,000 word mark at the time of this writing. It will require a lot of polish and enhancement before I really show it to anyone for editing. I still have fears that it'll get to a point where if there is a decent story in the chaff, I'll get stuck at a point where it can't be fully developed or completed. Or I might sabotage myself and give it a crap ending, validating my fear that I'm not able to cut it as an author.

I desperately wish I knew what I was doing, if what I have is "right". But it's subjective. And I can't send it out to people for comments if it's not minimally reworked; one of the bad things I've read about is asking for comments from someone then telling them a week later, "Wait! I redid these parts. See if it's better with this instead!"

I could be wasting my time completely.

But for now...I'm making goals to stick to. I wanted to add at least 500 words a day to the draft. I've been pleasantly surprised to be hitting about 1,000 almost every day.

So who knows? Maybe I'll have something good with this. Maybe it'll end up thrown away. If I can polish it, then get it edited a few times, I'll try shopping it around to a few hundred agents and see if there's interest. If not then at least I finally tried. I really haven't failed until I have tried, right?

Look Me In The Eye

2009-09-19T18:52:00.001-04:00

My wife bought this book and kept saying that she thought I'd like it. I dutifully took it and put it into my shelf to read later. Literally. I have an entire bookshelf of books to get to. And worse, I usually only get to read for a short time before going to bed at night, so at most I get a chapter done a night. Not a fast reader, I guess (part of this could also be attributed to the fact that I'm spending much of my after-work hours riding bike, at the gym, or working on a journal/blog/novel first draft...priorities, I suppose).

Anyway I finished a book and surveyed the shelves for what topic I should tackle next. My book on workouts that develop muscles? Essays on computer science? Starting your own business?...then I saw the book my wife gave me, Look Me In The Eye by John Elder Robison.

I was hooked by the second chapter. The book is about the life of the Aspergian brother of the author of the book Running With Scissors. Apparently he had one chapter about his brother John and had so much feedback from other Aspies that he urged his brother to try his hand at writing, and the result was this book.

I was in love with it. He described so many traits that slammed home in my own life. His inability to relate to people. His fondness for mechanical things. Inability to relate to what people were saying, his "eccentricities." Sensitivities. His compulsion to assign his own name for people or he'd forget who they were (his brother was for many years named "Varmint"). His rational, logical view of death of people he didn't know that neurotypicals find appalling. I totally understood his description because that was me. If a child of a friend's friend passed away in an accident, I don't react. It doesn't make sense to me, since people die every day. Thousands of people. We can't grieve for them all. I don't know that person, so I'm not sad. I'm glad that it didn't happen to my family or my immediate friends.

Neurotypicals apparently find this to be cold and irrational. It's perfectly rational.

Every chapter I read ended with me thinking, "Oh. My. God. This is me."

I didn't grow up with a mother in a mental hospital. I didn't have an alcoholic father. I did rather well academically and went on to college. But his mental issues were things I could relate to for the most part.

More to the point I finally found someone with whom I could relate. I often refer to Asperger wiring screwing with my viewpoint on things compared to other people because having this perspective is very lonely. It's hard for Normals to understand what it's like to be lonely but having an extreme aversion to relating to other people. It's not unlike having bariatric surgery and wanting that peanut butter brownie in the window with every tastebud on your tongue only to know that doing so could make you extremely, extremely ill. Not just an upset tummy. All out hours of agony ill culminating in sweats, palpitations and a toilet visit from the depths of Hades. See "Dumping Syndrome". Only this would be for social occasions and relating to people, not just food with sugar in it.

I haven't finished the book yet. Normally I finish before posting about it. But I was just too excited halfway through the book. Plus I discovered that he has a blog. I added it to the sidebar of this blog. He has his own website as well and a twitter account.

I think the best way to sum this up was summed up in my statement to my wife the first night I started reading the book; "How could you possibly have read this book and still not understand me better? This book is me." I learned that I'm not alone out here. There are others who have to cope with issues that I have to cope with (although it was a bit distressing to read the entry on his blog that points out there's a rather high incidence of suicide among people with Asperger's).

If you know someone with Asperger's this book can offer some insight to what it's like to be trapped in my head. If you don't know anyone with Aspergers,...well, it's still a great book telling you about a man with mental wiring that makes listening to neurotypicals a challenge in itself. Plus he worked with KISS. How can you not love a guy that made guitars that spit fire and smoke before it was a familiar spectacle on the performance stage?

Truly...I can't begin to describe how nice it is while reading this book to feel as if there are like-minded individuals in a world of neurotypicals. No matter how much we love our family there exists some things that they just can't relate to and they struggle to accept in us. This book highlights some of these issues, and maybe can help them understand a little better.

Urine Trouble if it's Dark

2009-09-17T18:53:00.000-04:00

I don't know who first told me this or where I read it, but after the surgery I was firmly afraid that I was not getting enough water.

There were warnings about drinking throughout the day, keeping hydrated, and generally making sure I was drinking water; not juices, not carbonated drinks, but water.

It was worse now that I wasn't eating as much as I used to. You have no idea how much of your water actually comes from the foods you eat, and when you overeat you get even more fluids indirectly from your diet.

The fear was in the darkness of urine. If the urine was a dark yellow, the story went, it meant I was dehydrated.

There were times it was dark. I'd drink until it was running nearly clear. There were times when I was drinking and I wasn't even thirsty, just to make sure I was keeping hydrated.

I just finished reading Don't Swallow Your Gum! by Dr. Aaron E. Carroll and Dr. Rachel C. Vreeman, and it dispells a lot of myths and lies about health and how the body works. Among them: how much water your body needs.

It's "common knowledge" that you should drink eight glasses of water a day. The problem is that is wrong. Back in 1945 the Food and Nutrition Board of National Research Council said that adults should get 2.5 liters (which translates into roughly 8 glasses of water) a day and that most of it comes from prepared foods.

That in itself would be fine except that people like things in trite, easy to remember tidbits. That advice somehow had the "food" part chopped out: thus the "8 glasses of water" myth.

The body apparently works to regulate fluids on its own quite well. Ever heard that when you're thirsty, you're dehydrated already? Well, the book addressed that too. Apparently your body, when it senses that it needs to retain water, releases a hormone called vasopressin, signaling the kidneys to retain water. This regulates automatically how often you feel the urge to go number one. So feeling thirsty doesn't mean that you're dehydrated.

But the most important...or at least, relevant...question addressed was on page 24. "Your Urine Should Be Almost Clear."

The book states this is a half-truth. To quote:
The color of the urine depends on its osmolality, which is the technical term for how much stuff is dissolved in the liquid. When there is more stuff dissolved in a given volume of urine, the urine is more concentrated, and therefore it looks darker. However, the osmolality of normal urine can be very different from person to person. One specialist in fluid regulation tested teh urine of sixty-nine healthy young adults and measured the average volume and concentrations of their urine. For this group, all of whom were considered well hydrated and healthy, the average volume of urine was 1.5 liters per day and the average concentration was 600 mosmol/kg H2O. At this average concentration, urine is moderately yellow in color, which could be interpreted as "dark" compared to the recommended "clear" or "pale yellow" you may think of as your goal. This concentration is, in fact, well within the normal range. Most of the time, normal urine from a healthy, well-hydrated person may be very yellow.

So urine color being yellow or "darker" doesn't mean you're dehydrated. I was worrying over nothing! Live and learn...

The Writing Show Speaks!

2009-09-14T18:23:00.001-04:00

The winners of The Writing Show's Halloween Short Story Contest have been announced. Go check it out!

Did I win? Well, no, and yes. I heard back from Paula B. and let's just say I'm greatly encouraged by the results :-) I'm not Scott or Ron. I'll leave it at that.

I've not heard the announcement podcast yet since it hasn't transferred to my iPod yet and I'm sure the stories will be following in a podcast near Halloween. I'm really looking forward to hearing them. My congratulations go to both the winners and the honorable mentions, and my sincere thank you to Paula and the judges!

Diet Myths that Keep Us Fat

2009-09-13T18:54:00.001-04:00

I just wrapped up reading the book Diet Myths That Keep Us Fat (and the 101 truths that will save your waistline-and maybe even your life) by Nancy Snyderman, MD. If you've heard her name before, it's probably because she's the medical correspondent for NBC news. She's a doctor, a correspondent, a TV personality...so I suppose that qualifies her as being an authority, certainly moreso than the numerous names that are slapped onto books without any verifiable backgrounds for the majority of us to find.

Nancy apparently has a real love of commas...I don't know why that stuck out to me, but it did. I thought she totally overused commas.

As for the content, though, it was a good summary of a number of the little floating bits of information and misinformation floating around out there. It reviews carbs. It review fats. It reviews pills and supplements and sugars found in foods and all sorts of wonderful things. It also has plenty of "truths" written in colored boxes that review things like, "You can lose more weight in cold weather" (sure!), "Belly fat has been linked to dementia" (yuppers), and "Muscle doesn't weigh more than fat" (a pound is a pound, dude...)

There was one item that I was skeptical of. On page 158 there is a blink bit about certain OTC painkillers helping muscle development in workouts. Being someone who has been having trouble seeing any results in my workouts, I thought this might be worth following up on...only to find that every hit of the keywords "advil muscle growth" is coming up with the opposite information. They inhibit growth! Yikes! I don't see any information in the back of the books, the notes, about where she would be citing information from what study. She has plenty of citations, just not for that "truth" I was looking for. I don't think after doing some quick Googling that it's a good idea to try taking the painkillers for a boost in results.

Otherwise it's a good book. Quick read, just took me a few nights to get through. I did skip the section on Nancy Snyderman's own dieting plan, though. Just stick to checking out her take on the 10 myths and see how many misconceptions she clears up for you!

Food Choices: Eat This, Not That!

2009-09-09T18:56:00.001-04:00

I've been reading an interesting book about food choices. It's actually a small series of books, called Eat This, Not That!. The latest one is Eat This, Not That! The Best (And Worst) Foods In America!: The No-Diet Weight-Loss Solution. The title is a mouthful and has a few too many rah-rah exclamation points for my taste, but it's a fascinating read. The book reviews foods from major restaurants and supermarkets to and illustrates just how bad things get without customers thinking about their choices, then offers alternatives to order (or purchase) instead.

Some examples: Worst "Healthy" Sandwich? Blimpie Special Vegetarian (12"). 1,186 calories, 60 g fat, 19 g saturated, 3,523 mg sodium and 131 carbohydrates.You'd be better off eating 2 Big Macs.

Worst Fast-Food Breakfast: McDonald's Deluxe Breakfast (large size biscuit) with syrup and margarine. 1,370 calories, 64.5 g fat, 21.5 g saturated, 2,340 mg sodium and 161 g carbs. The calories are more than 4 McD's cheeseburgers (300 a piece). They recommend instead the McMuffin (300 calories, 12 g fat, 5 saturated, 820 mg sodium, and 30 g carbs).

Want a real slap in the head? Worst Italian Entree: Romano's Macaroni Grill Spaghetti and Meatballs with meat sauce. 1,810 calories, 118 g fat (54 saturated), 4,900 mg sodium, 109 g carbohydrates. It's almost 3 times the recommended intake of sodium for the day combined into one meal! I mean, if your average intake is supposed to be 2300 mg of sodium and 2300 calories (rough average), this entree is way too much...but how many people would think they're taking such a hit in health from have spaghetti and meatballs?

Even appetizers aren't safe. Well, I guess it shouldn't be a surprise if you do any research on them. Worst Starter: Uno Chicago Grill Pizza Skins, Full Order. 2,400 calories. 155 g fat, 45 saturated. 3,600 mg sodium. I mean...you do share them, right? Yeah, right. I'm sure you're not having too many of them...instead, they recommend the Thai Vegetable Pot Stickers, at 400 calories, 20 g fat (2 saturated), 1,080 mg sodium, 46 g carbs instead.

The book also harshly slams restaurants for pulling an Applebees; they highlight the places that won't tell you what they're feeding you by hiding nutrition information. When I was dieting pre-surgery in January, I started going through online nutrition information and downloading lists for my iPod so I could make decent choices in places like Red Lobster (by the way, stay away from the admiral's feast...the book put that one into perspective relatively quickly. But on the other hand, Red Lobster also had a lot of healthy choices you can make. Tread carefully.)

Applebees was among the restaurants that won't make the information available, and it was a restaurant that we often went to, as in once or twice a month at least. I emailed their customer service, and they simply said they couldn't provide the information (Um, let's be real...you wouldn't provide it. Don't tiptoe around it) because they can't guarantee ingredients and there were variations from restaurant to restaurant location.

So...are you telling me that if I go to a different Applebees, your food is significantly different in each location, so I can't rely on any consistency in your dishes??

I was so pissed that I stopped going there, and would spread the word whenever the opportunity arose that they are consumer-unfriendly. Red Lobster provides it. Olive Garden provides it. Applebees,...well, I'm going to Red Lobster or Panera.

Oops. Side rant. Anyway, the book harshes on restaurants that pull this by giving them an "F" on a restaurant summary chapter. The only information they could pull from places like these were calorie counts, due to a law that was passed in New York about providing this minimum bit of information (Funny...you can't provide consistent nutrition information unless it passed into NYC, eh? Do I sound a little irked at this?)

I got curious because the book harshed on a lot of wraps in different restaurants; I didn't think my wraps for my average meals were all that bad. So I looked at some of the information labels for what I have been putting in lately.

Tortilla. Azteca. 120 calories, 2.5 g fat, .5 saturated, 0 chol, 300 mg sodium, 22 g carb, no sugar, 3 g protein.

Add a slice of reduced fat colby-jack cheese from Sargento. 50 calories, 4 g fat, 2.5 saturated, 10 mg chol, 120 mg sodium, 0 carb, 0 sugar, 5 g protein.

Add some thin-sliced honey ham. From the label of one brand I use, 2 oz is 80 calories, 2.5 g fat, 1 g saturated, 30 mg chol, 710 mg sodium, 4 g carbs, 4 g sugar, 10 grams protein.

I normally use probably half a serving, so the count I'm using is closer to 40 calories, 1.5 g fat, 15 mg chol, 355 mg sodium, 2 g carbs, 2 g sugar, 5 grams protein, and that's the story I'm sticking to.

Then a slice of 2% cheese from Kraft. Off the label: 45 calories, 3 g fat, 1.5 saturated, 10 mg cholesterol, 250 mg sodium, 1 g carb, 1 g sugar, 4 gram protein.

Then mushrooms to add filler from Green Giant: I use probably 1/4 cup, and the information on the label is for 1/2 a cup. So I'll write the estimated 1/4 cup information here. 12 calories, 0 fat, 0 chol, 220 sodium, 2 g carb, .5 sugar, 1 g protein.

So some math would estimate that my wraps are in the neighborhood of 267 calories, 11 g fat, 5 saturated, 35 mg cholesterol, 1,245 mg sodium, 27 g carbohydrates, 3.5 g sugar, and 18 g protein, plus some sodium for the mustard I add on.

I don't think that's too bad. In most restaurants the wraps come out horrible...for example, ETNT says in the vocab guide that a wrap weighs in at 600 calories on average, with the average tortilla being 300 calories. Applebee's Chicken Fajita Rollup weighs in at 1,450 calories, listed as the worst wrap in the "Worst Healthy Foods in America" chapter. The honor of worst wrap in the Worst Sandwiches in America list also went to Applebee's with the Applebee's Oriental Chicken Rollup at 1,550 calories.

Unless my estimate are really really off, my wraps aren't that bad. Three a day comes to 801 calories, give or take for variation (swiss cheese instead of the colby-jack, for example). the only thing I add on top of this are my peanuts and peanut butter, which I'm gradually moving to more peanuts than PB; they early on showed promise in anecdotally reducing some dizziness I felt when going to the gym or riding bike, so I added them in during the course of the day.

But here's the kicker; choices you make in your diet mean paying attention to labels, and things you'd think would be no-brainers take more brains than you'd think. I came to the conclusion that my numbers probably aren't too far off from restaurants simply because they must be made differently. What cemented that idea?

I have a jar of peanuts that I've been refilling from a Sam's Club ginormo pack of peanuts or mixed nuts. The jar is from Target, their "Market Pantry" brand of dry roasted peanuts. I figure...how hard is it? Peanuts, some salt, right? Well, I happened to look at the label. In order: dry roasted peanuts, salt, sugar, maltodextrin, monosodium glutamate (um...isn't that MSG?), torula yeast, paprika and other spices, natural flavors (they're PEANUTS! What did you ADD?!), hydrolized soy proteins, onion and garlic powder.

Wha...?!

I picked up the ginormo pack of peanuts from Sam's, which happened to be Planter's Extra Large Virginia Peanuts. Listed: peanuts, sea salt, peanut and/or cottonseed oil.

Two of the same products; peanuts. Two very different labels.

I recommend this book not just because it has great information, but because it made me think. Books that make you think make an impact, a difference, and for that reason I very much recommend it to other people in hopes that they, too, will be driven to think and take action or maybe alter some of their habits or perspectives.

Final Writing Show Authoring Update...

2009-08-22T21:03:00.000-04:00

The second entry has been sent in! A third round of minor edits was performed, converted it to PDF, and then mailed it off with the contact info and disclaimer. I even remembered this time to give it a tentative title on the stop of the first page before emailing it this time (insert a little grin here)

I'll refrain from commenting on my own sizing up of the work here. I remember Mur saying in one of her I Should Be Writing podcasts that authors shouldn't downplay their work to the people they're pitching it to...basically any potential audience...so I'll just reserve my own judgement here and let others decide.

Again I already think that I did well just in starting the story, writing it, and managing to send it in. I even did this twice! I completed the tasks and thus achieved my goals. I don't need to actually win the contest (although it would be nice, don't get me wrong) because my goal was to submit something respectable as an entry in the first place, to see this through to the end. I did that. I even got it in before the deadline of the 31st!

Now all I can do is wait and see if I get some confirmation that Paula B. received the entry.

Whether in the end the story...well, stories...are good or bad, I gained some experience. I'm happy with that!

Critiquing an Author's Work

2009-08-22T18:25:00.002-04:00

I listen to several different podcasts; I listen to audio books (like Zombie Chronicles, the Heaven series, and Sigler's novels), I listen to tech podcasts (StackOverflow is a favorite) and various podcasts centering on advice for amateur authors (I Should Be Writing, for example).

A recent podcast I started listening to is called "Get Published" by Michell Plested. He took a risk and read an old story as an audio story and fed it into the podcast feed. A subsequent podcast included some feedback, which sounded like he had some good comments.

Me...I didn't like it. I couldn't finish listening to it. Maybe there was negative feedback and he didn't acknowledge it. Maybe he just didn't have a lot of people give negative feedback. I don't know.

I just know I didn't like it. I actually stopped listening partway through it.

His characters were simply so far off in some ideal world of black-and-white behavior that I couldn't suspend belief. Even when a story is sci-fi or fantasy, you have to be able to put yourself into that story, into that situation, and believe that what is happening could actually happen in those circumstances. His story had started off with a character that was utterly revolting in his behavior towards a woman that he essentially "saved" after her husband was killed and was claiming as his own property. As I recall he was taking her to the king or sheriff or some other official to make his claim over her official; he was physically and emotionally abusive, as she was property, not a person.

That in itself is believable behavior in a particular environment. Stories including slavery tends to demonstrate this attitude. Many stories centered in Olde England or medieval Europe or very pious and religious societies shows women treated as less-than-equals in status. Okay...I'll buy that.

Except he and his property meet up with this "knight" that is the polar opposite. Far, far extreme opposite, where he stands up for the damsel's dignity, threatening the revolting bastard that was abusing his newly-claimed property.

Now...in a society where this appeared to be the "norm" in how people are treated, how do you just happen to find two such extremes in behavior? Even the speech patterns were way too far over the mark, with the noble knight stepping in to show what an uncouth rascal the jerk truly was. Yes, there are extremes in any society, but this was just too coincidental.

Worse, in a society where it was apparently accepted as the "right thing to do" (the antagonists words) to go to a local official to make the claim over his "woman", somehow this knight was so far removed from this society in which he lives that he was appalled at this guy's gall.

Sorry, not buying it.

But I didn't give the author feedback. I wouldn't want to, unless I was directly asked. He took a big risk in exposing his writing like that. And I hate to discourage him without being prompted for an honest opinion.

So how does one handle critiquing a new author's work?

I prefer, personally, getting honest feedback. If I'm on the wrong track, let me know. If it's salable material, I'd love to know and if it's not then I don't want to continue wasting my time on it. I'm not a professional writer or English major so if I'm not very good at writing then I can accept that kind of criticism; I'd be as broken up about it as hearing my future does not lay in a sports career or professional ballet dancer.

But I also know I am an introverted individual with Asperger's, so I don't know how other people prefer to get feedback. I prefer open honesty but apparently other people don't; just observe the reaction of Alice Hoffman, an established author, when she got a bad review from a critic. That article also has many other examples of authors bahaving poorly to criticism...

So I guess the question is, what is the expected protocol in giving feedback? Michell sounded like the feedback he got was positive; but I know that if asked my feedback would have been less than positive. I was glad to hear in the followup that the story was very old and I'd presume that with time and practice he would have found more of his voice in his writing and hopefully improved. I'd like to think that I can offer constructive criticism that, if taken in the manner it was meant when offered, could be used to improve his writing a bit.

Or maybe my criticism is specific to me; his story simply didn't appeal to me. He obviously had some people that liked his work from the feedback he repeated on the next podcast.

If anyone has been in the position to be asked to give feedback to someone who is writing a story and you found elements that you really didn't like, how did you handle the situation? What affected your decision to handle it the way you did?

The Writing Show: Entry Number Two Update for August 20th

2009-08-20T21:06:00.003-04:00

Well...round two of editing done, I incorporated the changes along with some extra trimming, and it's now at 4,996 words! Remember it had to be under 5,000...I had to trim several bits here and there. I think I ended up chopping about three hundred words or so. But the story is slightly tighter now.

As I type this my printer is spitting out a copy once more for my gratis editor to look at and see if it has her blessing to send out. I'm more or less happy with it as an entry. I don't think it's as good as it could be, but if I waited until the perfect story came onto the digital page I'd never bother starting a story in the first place.

I was slightly sidetracked while trying to edit it because I looked through the transparent window on the side of my computer case and realized my CPU fan had died. I don't know how long it had been seized up, but if left that way there was a possibility of the CPU overheating and dying. Luckily the case was kind of overengineered for cooling and it never skipped a beat. I removed the side panel and stuck a mini desk fan near it at an angle to help with airflow, then went to NewEgg to buy a new CPU fan on rush order.

I hate working on those. I don't mind replacing hard disks, CD-ROMs, memory, daughter cards...but those @#% coolers on the CPU? I hate them. Now I get to spend time trying to replace it, hopefully tomorrow, since I don't relish leaving this little deskfan on all the time but I access my computer all the time, even remotely, for doing file storage and email.

My next "data storage" system is definitely going to be designed with commodity parts and distributed failure protection built in. This computer was expensive and is a pain to fix up when there is a failure, but it was very well engineered (I definitely recommend Puget after dealing with them several years ago to get this system, especially if you're a gamer. These guys worked with me to get a great Linux system with RAID; it's built like a tank. With a broken fan, now, but it's a few years old so I'll forgive that.)

Anyway, that was my night. I've been putting in crazy hours at work and still trying to get gym time and story time and the occasional blog time along with the journaling for the insurance-mandated psychology appointments (from the surgery...you have been following the blog, right?)

Print job is complete. Time to head out until tomorrow. Paula...you'll be getting the story soon!

Writing Show Entry Two Update for August 16

2009-08-16T21:08:00.002-04:00

As I type this the first round edit is done. Did some rearranging, some altering, some rewording, and now I'm printing out the document to review it again. It's been trimmed to just around 5100 words...still more cutting to do.

Here's an interesting question...from what I have found on manuscript formatting, you're not supposed to do things like italicize words and bold words and such, so how do you express certain ideas as thoughts if you don't? I could probably get away with doing that, but in this story I just used quotes as if the character were speaking for now. I don't know what format it's "supposed" to be in.

If I were asked this question by my daughter I'd tell her to look for the rules and see if there was clarification in the rules, but I didn't see anything at the Writing Show's website. I guess Paula's either looking for the standard manuscript formatting rules or she doesn't mind liberties with formatting...I'm toying with the idea of just emailing the show to ask her.

It's probably not a big deal but I'd prefer to do whatever makes it easier for the judges to get through their pile of entries. I know that little things can really make a difference if you hit that little annoyance fifteen times a day.

What I'll probably end up doing is digging around for my standard manuscript formatting notes and see if I can rework it that way. The thing is that last time I researched this topic I could have sworn that the SMF was actually more like "suggested manuscript format", and the rule of thumb was to fall back on those suggestions (or close to them) only if there wasn't a stated preference by agents and publishers for the submission you're making to their particular taste. Ugh.

I'll first concern myself with getting the story polished a little then worry about formatting, I suppose.

Writing Show Entry Two Update for August 14th

2009-08-14T21:09:00.001-04:00

I didn't write too much about this because it was late last night when I finally crawled off to bed, but my story reached over 5,000 words. It was near the 5200 mark, actually, and I printed it out...22 pages...and handed it over to my in-house editor for critique/alterations/editing/checking/general suggestions.

I personally didn't think it was all that great. If it is a decent story it's probably in need of a few coats of paint and really big dose of polish, but the primary goal for me was to sit down and just do it; it is an entry, I managed to get a small story out, and I completed what I started. My work in this case is to short stories what Nanowrimo...national novel writing month, in case you didn't know...is to published novels.

I should be careful saying that though. Some people have gone on from Nanowrimo entries to be published. Keeping that in mind would get my hopes up.

At any rate, the story is in the hands of my wife to get the first round of cutting and pasting. After she gives several rough chops I'll go back through it and we'll work on paring it into something that would be decent enough to email to Paula B. for the contest. Hopefully it'll be in her hands by the middle of next week.

If you do visit the Writing Show website, you should also check out the tribute being assembled for screenwriter/author Blake Snyder; he passed away of a pulmonary embolism on August 4th. His Save the Cat! series was great for aspiring screenwriters and his talent as a mentor preceded him in the industry. He'll be sorely missed.

That's where things stand on the second story. I've been negligent in maintaining the blog while I worked for periods of time on the story, but most wouldn't have noticed (even though my audience consists of maybe three people)...I had already queued a large number of blog entries to keep on my minimum-one-posting-a-day regiment. The only thing that really suffered was my replying to comments.

I read them, of course, but I didn't take the time to reply. Please don't be too offended if I didn't reply to a comment that you wanted a reply to...I was just working on the story instead of the blogging.

Until there's more to report I'll be flitting off for a bit. Well, not entirely. I've got a small backlog of topics to add to the blog queue. So until next time, here's a tip-o-the-hat to you all...have a good night!

Writing Show Entry Two Update

2009-08-11T21:11:00.002-04:00

Well the last update had me at a few shy of 2500 words for my second entry. I see on Facebook that Paula B. is saying there's under three weeks to get an entry in...I'm working on giving her at least a week of lead time on this, since I know she probably gets most of her entries at the last minute (not that a week before deadline gives much leeway, but hey, it's something, right?).

That's my goal anyway.

Tonight I reached a word count of 3,554.

It's progress!

Hopefully I'll wrap it up in the next two or three days, then I'll see how it's received when I ask for help with the editing.

Until next time...

Three Signs of a Miserable Job

2009-08-11T18:57:00.001-04:00

I had read Three Signs of a Miserable Job awhile ago and thought it was fantastic. I enjoyed it so much that I even wrote the three signs down on a paper and found them again recently while going through my desk and it reminded me of where I remembered ideas like having measurable goals and how in part to try managing other people in the workplace in a way that hopefully doesn't leave me looking like a PHB.

You can read a quick summary here (although I REALLY encourage ANYONE with questions about their job happiness to read the book...it's short, it's easy to read through, and the story format is very user-friendly!) but the three signs are:

Anonymity, the feeling employees get when they realize their manager has little interest in them as a human being and know little about their lives, aspirations and interests.
Irrelevance, when the employees cannot see how their job makes a difference in the lives of others in one way or another.
Immeasurement, which is the inability of employees to assess for themselves their contributions or successes. Without a means of doing this employees have to rely on subjective measurements and opinions of others, usually their manager.

It's something that gives me pause to think once in awhile and sometimes a reason that I plant myself down and start researching either the programming language hobby or plug away at that novel in my head; the hope that maybe one or the other could pay off in a better job function for me. But no matter what my situation is, these three nuggets of wisdom are invaluable for anyone in the working world and that book may help you evaluate if it is time for you to polish your resume and see if the grass really is greener on the other side of the fence...once you can get over the fear that it's greener because of the hidden septic tank, that is.

Writing Show Entry Two Update

2009-08-10T21:13:00.001-04:00

I haven't posted for awhile about the story...shame on me...

The truth is that I've been on a trip out of state for a few days so I've been a little busy as of late. The blog has been running largely on autopilot, so there may be some posted comments that I haven't replied to. I simply didn't set aside time to do it. As I type this it's 12:26 in the morning and I'm going to be heading home soon after we all get around in the morning...

Anyway, I did take some time to work on the story over the past few days. My previous update had me at 798 words. My current word count is just a couple words short of 2500. For something I'm cramming into an hour or so at night before bed I don't think that's too shabby!

Anyway, the story is progressing. I am hoping to get it finished over the next few days and then it'll get edited and hopefully in with a bit of lead time for Paula B. to review.

I'm not thinking this will be a masterpiece by any measure but my primary goal is to get experience and writing something, so simply completing it and getting it turned in for review will be enough for me to count it as a victory. I'm crossing my fingers that I'll be able to get some feedback on the story, some suggestions and such would be great. But that's not a guarantee with this contest. It's also a no-fee for entry contest so I wouldn't be surprised if there's simply limited time and resources for offering such feedback. That would just be icing on the cake; no hard feelings or disappointment if it doesn't happen. But that doesn't keep from having the hope of getting such feedback from tickling the back of my mind.

It's late, I'm supposed to finish packing up in the morning and then a long long ride home followed by trying to catch up on a lot of backlogged items (like getting to the gym!) before heading back to work. So good night everyone. Tune in later for yet another posting to appear from yours truly...

Scheduling Blog Entries

2009-08-10T21:12:00.002-04:00

You know one of the neat things about Blogger?

Most people probably don't take advantage of it. But I have been. I've been trying to make it a goal to improve some writing skills by writing enough material to fit at least one entry a day. So far I've been pretty good at keeping up with that.

Turns out there's a place at the bottom of your Blogger posting window called "post options. " If you click it, you can allow or disallow comments and backlinks for the particular post, but you can also change the post date and time.

Neat! I can back date stuff!

But I haven't. What I discovered was that it was a simple way to post things in the future.

I know, bloggers probably already knew it. But what it allowed me to do was queue up several entries in a row...if I have enough time to get three or four things off my chest and they're not time dependent, like my "writing show updates" I had been posting, I can set things to appear several days in advance. You don't know when this posting was being written because I just set it up to come into the lists days from now; that way if something happens I still have material appearing, keeping me up to date with my goal of at least one post per day.

Neat, huh?

Well, maybe not for most people, but I'm finding it useful for my purposes. I did tell my wife it'll be weird for her if something happened to me...accident, heart attack, who knows?...and still my posts are appearing one at a time for the next several days. Depending on how far ahead I get she may get material trickling in for a month or more.

That could be a little creepy, I suppose...

Second Writing Show Entry Update

2009-08-04T21:14:00.002-04:00

I am a little disappointed that I only made it to 798 words tonight, adding a mere 373 words to my previous count. I did an admirable job of procrastinating, though.

Honestly, I was poking away at it and got to a point where I want to work through a scene without stopping and I thought I'd be interrupted at some inconvenient point, seeing the time and all. So I'll save it for tomorrow.

Oh well. Not a fantastic amount of progress, but it was still progress. I'll get this story out one way or another...

Second Writing Show Entry, Second Try

2009-08-03T21:16:00.001-04:00

I have been working for awhile on a second story entry for The Writing Show, and all the while it was slowly morphing into a substory from another, longer story idea I had been playing with.

In the end I didn't think it really fit into the whole Halloween storyline theme thing.

I knew I could chop out a large portion to fix the length issue (it was way over the 5000 word limit and not done yet!). I was pondering what to do while wandering through a Walmart to pick up some prescriptions when inspiration struck.

Unfortunately it does mean I scrapped trying to enter the other one. I'm now 425 words into a new story. With some luck and perseverance, I will have this one done fairly soon and can see if my wife will help me with the editing.

I've had a lot to cram into a night...a family picnic, rebuilding an old computer for my in-laws...twice, since as SOON as I installed Windows and tried updating it with antivirus and an updated web browser, the @#$% hard disk died, so now I'm re-reinstalling everything on another drive. As you can tell this is taking some time and I'm getting rather wonky in the head. Perfect time to have worked on my new story.

Anyway, I made some progress and I'm optimistic about it. Hopefully we'll see more posts about progress appearing here!

Weight Training for Dummies

2009-08-02T18:59:00.001-04:00

It took me about a week to finish reading Weight Training for Dummies (this review is being posted long after I've finished the book) by Liz Neporent, Suzanne Schlosberg, and Shirley Archer.

The book includes the trademark Dummies 5th Wave comics and is filled with the entertaining, down-to-Earth writing style I've come to expect from Dummies books. At a glance, the book includes chapters on "Before You Pick Up a Weight", "Weighing In with Weigh Training Wisdom", "Tackling the Exercises", "Setting Up Your Workout Programs", and of course no Dummies book is complete without "The Part of Tens".

I'm a complete novice at the whole weight training thing. More than that, I hate the whole fitness "thing". Hearing people slinging lingo like "abs" and "glutes" makes me immediately try to tune out the conversation and being lectured about the importance of fitness sounds like one long la la la la la...

However, due to the surgery, I had to do something to try exercising. I love biking, but the area I'm in makes it difficult to ride. I managed to stick with a stationary bike routine but I still wanted to do something to add some variety.

I mentioned to my parents that I was considering doing something with a local gym and they decided to gift me with a one-year membership there. Knowing nothing about working out in a gym, I picked up this book to try learning some of the ins and outs of what to expect with a workout routine.

Keep in mind that I am anti-fitness and knew next to nothing about it.

This book communicated in a clear and fun way to a complete novice different things to remember when weight lifting, from safety to courtesy in gyms to some background on the Nautilus machine versus the Nautilus brand.

If you're considering starting a weight-lifting routine and don't know a dumbbell from a barbell, you should definitely start with this book to start your learning journey. I didn't finish the book an expert by any means but I definitely had a better grasp of my goals and understanding of working out; it was at least enough to help put me a little more at ease the first time I walked into that gym.

And The Second Story Rides Again

2009-07-28T21:19:00.000-04:00

I slacked last week on writing that second entry for The Writing Show contest. I admit it...I spent the time I normally set aside for writing instead on watching Torchwood and Doctor Who specials. Torchwood: Children of Earth was a five-parter on consecutive nights and Doctor Who: Planet of the Dead was Sunday night. Torchwood rocks...despite the twist and that I wanted to punch Davies in the face for the cliffhanger...and Doctor Who could have been better but I loved the flying stingray creatures. Both of these are supposed to be setups for continuing storylines (sniff...no more Tennant?...)

Anyway, my last entry said that I had 2,971 words in my work-in-progress. My current word count is 3,883, so I managed to add 912 words tonight while also making it a palindromic number. Cool beans! (Ever wonder why the word for a palindrome isn't one?)

I'm not too worried at this point because I already figured I'm cutting a large chunk out (the rules are that this has to be less than 5,000 words). I have actually been thinking of incorporating this into a larger storyline that's swimming around in my head, so if I can properly sculpt this into something that isn't necessarily a polished turd (actually, after watching that episode of Mythbusters...it might be a good goal to make a polished turd. They're kind of neat) I might try incorporating it into a larger storyline. The big if is whether or not I can make this into a story that might be appropriate as a short story with a Halloween theme. I also need to figure out if, when writing a parenthetical, does the period go inside the parentheses or outside? I favor the outside because it just looks right to me...but I don't know.

Anyway, I'm aiming to get the rough draft done this week so I can beg my wife to help with editing it next week. Wish me luck!

What Defines a Work as "Yours"?

2009-07-27T18:27:00.005-04:00

Here's a question.

I had entered The Writing Show's Halloween story contest. I had written, over the course of four or five days, a 5,000 word story (okay, it was closer to 6,000 at the time, but it had to be pared down for requirement reasons).

As you can tell from reading blog entries my "first drafts" are entirely in need of editing. After I wrote the story I had help from my wife in cutting sections and seeing what areas she thought could use rewording, rework, or clarification as well as grammar and punctuation alterations.

I had some very cursory feedback from the sponsor of the contest; it sounded like my entry, in her opinion, was decent. The contest goes on until the end of August so there's plenty of time for others to far outshine me but just having someone say that it seemed like a good short story to read was a nice boost to my confidence.

One thought nagged me, though. She never saw what I actually wrote. What she got was probably 95% mine, but the edits? Grammar and punctuation that was corrected? Some impetus to rewrite or cut paragraphs? Those were my wife. My story was cut from near 6,000 words to around 4,800 or so.

Part of me tells my inner voice that it's ridiculous. The story was mine. Plot. Majority of descriptions, theme, etc...I came up with all that in this case. But I still have that nagging thought of, "At what point is the story no longer yours?"

Is there a point where the editing is so different that your original writing is just too different to be really yours, but instead a definite collaboration?

Maybe that's a question for others more experienced in the field of authorship. Right now it's an intellectual curiosity for me. Anyone out there have some ideas?

My Sister's Keeper

2009-07-20T22:58:00.000-04:00

On the way back from a recent trip, I suggested we stop and see a movie. It was the last chance we would have for awhile to watch something without having to make sure it was family-rated (for the four year old) or necessarily mainstream pop-culture (for the teenager).

The theater just happened to have a showing of My Sister's Keeper, based on the Jodi Picoult novel. My wife had loved the book and mentioned wanting to see it. I thought it would not be my kind of movie but I also thought she would enjoy watching it.

For those unfamiliar with the story the movie is based on a simple premise: how far will you go to save the life of your sick child? In this story, Kate, is diagnosed with cancer and requires a range of treatments ranging from blood transfusions to bone marrow aspirations and eventually a new kidney. The parents are not compatible matches, so they have a child that is engineered by selecting the proper sperm and egg from the mother and father to ensure that the resulting sibling will be the correct genetic match for body parts.

In other words, they had a little girl for the express purpose of having spare body parts for the sick child.

Time goes on and the little girl is loved as their own child should be but at the same time Anna has been used for stem cells, cord blood, bone marrow, blood transfusions, and when the time comes for a kidney to be transplanted, is first in line for the surgery.

For reasons that escape her mother Anna decides to hire a lawyer and sue her parents to be "medically emancipated" so she cannot be compelled to donate more body parts, thus resulting in what she knows would be her sister's death.

I didn't read the book; my wife said that the ending of the movie was different from the novel, and she didn't like some of the editing resulting from the movie.

My feeling was that the movie was based on one premise (is it ethical to have a child to use for spare parts?) and create a story by sticking that premise on a woman that had come to define her life on fighting for her daughter's life to the detriment of her son and other daughter, her husband, and her career. Her entire reason for being was keeping her daughter alive.

The movie also had a disjointed feeling as the narrative jumped not just from one person to the next, showing their perspective on the story, but also through time, showing the interaction of the family members at various stages of Kate's cancer. It wasn't a jarring feeling while watching but it was something to stop a few moments and think about so you could figure at why Kate was just in the hospital and now she's got hair.

One might think the movie was about Kate's illness and coping with the possibility of death, or it is a story of her sister's fight for medical emancipation and the right to have a say in what happens to her body. In the end, you see that it was neither. The story was the obsession of a mother doing whatever she could to save her child, obsessed to the point where she sacrificed her family and life and refused to listen to anyone or even consider for a moment that this cancer was an battle she was going to lose.

The movie was about two hours long and while it didn't seem long and boring it wasn't one of the movies where I walked out shocked at the passage of time either. The movie was more like a series of vignettes related to one another but not quite fitting seamlessly, and the time had passed as a decent popcorn movie should allow.

The only real problem that I had with this movie was that it seemed to have stretched the premise a little too much. I think the story as told in this interpretation of the novel could have been a bit shorter or had elaborated on the story more. There was no interpretation or development based on the premise so much as there was just a restatement of the premise at different points.

Overall it was a good popcorn movie with a bit of a meaty piece of food for thought for parents in the audience to think about. If you have a couple hours to kill and want to take a female significant other out to a movie this is a good choice. Just don't take a die-hard Picoult fan. I had the distinct feeling that the movie was just too different from the novel for my wife to really enjoy as much as she liked the novel.

Another Writing Show Update About the Second Entry!

2009-07-19T21:22:00.002-04:00

I thought adding an exclamation point would make it seem more exciting. Compared to just a period, I think it does make it seem a little more interesting. For what it's worth, anyway.

I went through my previous updates for my second entry to the Halloween Writing Show contest and saw that I actually forced myself to do a little math by adding my 444 words to my first word count, so if I am right I started this weekend with 1,706 words and hoped to add a "significant" number to that.

My current word count is 2,971, working by stealing a few moments from trying to get some things done around the house and exercise fun. That means that I added 1,265 words. All the previous caveats about cutting huge amounts of crapola out of the draft still applies, but I'm hoping that I'm actually into the part that might be somewhat interesting now.

Or maybe I'm completely offtrack there. I don't know how to tell if the story is any good...my current plan is to just keep forging ahead for now and if it works, it works, and if not, then I'll try again if there's time for a second entry. If I'm lucky I'll have something with this one that can be at least reshaped a bit so it might be a contender. I figure the important thing is that I'm trying...

Update on Second Entry to Writing Show

2009-07-16T21:23:00.001-04:00

I didn't get much added yesterday to the story, but I did get a small bit more done tonight; I compared the word count to the last blog update and found that I added 444 words. Not great, but some progress.

It just wasn't a good day for accomplishing so much. I got out of work, picked up my daughter from work, went to the gym, went home and took a bath (my first since the surgery!) and then my parents came for dinner at our house; after that I was up paying bills, which in itself was both depressing and a little nerve wracking after a snafu with paying occurred that will only get sorted out tomorrow morning when the bank re-opens the office. After the bank account was officially nearly depleted...I have roughly thirty dollars to last me the next two weeks...but the bills are more or less paid as far as I can tell...I tried to work on the story.

Probably not the best conditions under which to concentrate on the story-writing bit.

But hey, we all have off days, right? My goal was to get this story sent off before the end of July, which means I still have two weeks to get this completed (and possibly edited).

Tomorrow looks like it will also be a busy day so I don't know if I'll get more done with writing, but I will most likely have time this weekend to get significant progress in. At least that's the plan.

Four hundred forty four words. Not great, but it was something. Hopefully by the end of the weekend I'll have finally dug into a portion of the story that I can use as an anchor for the submission (as I mentioned previously the beginning will most likely be cut out because it just seems too slow for an opening bit to the story but I was continuing through it to find where, organically, the story will find its traction. Hopefully).

It's getting late, I'm going to work tomorrow...time to go to bed.

Writing Contest Entry Two

2009-07-15T21:24:00.001-04:00

I began a second story for The Writing Show's Halloween Story Contest. I started piecemealing it together a previous day but had a block of time while waiting in line for a certain movie late last night to sit and type for a bit*; my current word count according to OpenOffice is 1,262 words.

I'm kind of disappointed at how it's shaping up. My story is not diving into the action the way I hoped it would; evaluating what I was working with, I decided the best thing to do was to keep on the course I plotted and later during editing chop it (or reshape the opening after chopping) so that once the story does kick into gear I can get a good feel for where the opening action sequence should be placed.

Why?

Because if I didn't, I'd end up with the trap of scrapping the story and starting over ad infinitum, essentially never getting anywhere with the story. In reviewing the little movie in my head I thought that maybe there was a nugget of story in the mix worth trying to save and I wanted to try to get that out there before paring it down to the short story required by the contest (although to be fair a slow beginning is a sin in writing any story; in this regard, the story would need a massive bit of beginning work no matter the format).

So I'm working on it. I'll try sneaking in more work on it here and there and see what can be done. I can only submit two entries to the contest and I already submitted the first one so I'd like to try coming up with a nice second story to submit; I have until the end of August for the deadline but I'd like to get this one in by the end of July.

* I said I was out late waiting for a particular movie to start while working on my story entry. I'd blog a review...but there's really no reason. There's going to be so much back and forth with rabid fans and miscreants blathering non-opinions just to rule up the rabid fans that my opinion isn't really worth anything in the back and forth; anything I'd say would essentially be a "me too" so someone else's review, so in a rare moment of restraint I'll refrain from adding to this battle.

Self Publishing: Why the Bad Name?

2009-07-01T21:26:00.002-04:00

Why does self publishing have a bad name?

Probably in part because the industry allows books like this to be released.

To give you an idea of the quality of the book, here's an image of the first page from the first chapter. Think it's just a fluke? Here's the beginning of chapter nine.

Supposedly here is the link to the author's blog.

I can't tell if it's a massive joke or not. If you want some entertainment, read the comments on the Amazon link.

I don't think there's a way to adequately express my dismay at yet another example of why self-publishing is laughed at so often in the publishing community. There are so many authors that do work hard and eventually try (and sometimes succeed) the self-publishing route, risking getting their name muddied for being associated with that side of the industry, in part because of books like this.

The Writing Show Contest Update 8

2009-06-27T21:27:00.001-04:00

The final count for the story was 4,827 words. Took several rounds of editing, but I just emailed it. Twice, actually. The first time I didn't put in some information that Paula B. might find handy, like the title of the story...

But it's done. I can work on a second one but right now it's time for a break, I think.

The Writing Show Contest Update 7

2009-06-26T21:00:00.000-04:00

Ah, lucky update number seven. My wife had gone through the draft again, more edits and cuts were made, and it was still over the limit. I went back through and cut another four hundred words. The current word count is now 4,826!

I'm printing it out now for another run through and then if it's deemed "done enough" I'll convert it to PDF and send the entry.

It's hard to edit a story. My wife is far better with the grammar and punctuation thing, but when it comes to cutting and rearranging, to changing words...that is hard in a different way. In my head I have a better idea of what I meant. On paper, it comes out different. Then with a word limit, you end up making cuts to details and information that seems to subtly change the story in ways you prefer not to change it, but at the same time you need to fit the requirements of your audience.

In the end the story isn't quite as "good" as you'd like it to be in some ways. But that comes with the territory I suppose. I know I was cutting words out with descriptions and dialog that I thought helped show some of the characters personalities and better illustrate to the reader what the environment and characters looked like.

So I tell myself that if I suddenly become very rich and famous, I can rewrite the story as a "director's cut". I know very well that in truth I'll probably never touch the story again, but this achieves the short term goal.

Hopefully this means that this weekend my entry will be ready to email to Paula B.!

The Writing Show Contest Update 6

2009-06-25T21:29:00.001-04:00

My wife had a few edits that she wrote in and gave to me last night; today I made a couple changes and re-printed the story for her to look at again. She said this time she's going to help with trimming things and look at the second half for grammar mistakes.

I'm hoping to have something to turn in soon. The ending was a bit cliche, she said, and I agreed. Mainly because I had other things in mind and found out that the things I had in mind would go way over the 5000 word limit so I ended up putting in a cheap ending that feels rushed.

But like I said...I was aiming at trying to enter, not necessarily expecting to win.

Hesselbeck Sued for Copyright Infringement

2009-06-24T18:35:00.001-04:00

Elisabeth Hasselbeck is being sued for stealing a book idea. I found the stories here and here.

I personally think Hasselbeck's an idiot. I've consistently found that her views are illogical, naive, unreasonable and/or little more than the same rhetoric spouted by the likes of Rush Limbaugh. But is there merit in this case?

Without actually seeing the work I don't know. Supposedly author Susan Hassett had sent Hasselbeck a copy of her self-published book "Living With Celiac Disease" and Mrs. Hasselbeck copied it word for word in her own book "The G-Free Diet: A Gluten-Free Survival Guide".

If she did indeed copy it "word for word" then I'd think there's not much to save her; it's a pretty clear cut case of infringement. If Ms. Hassett is lying about that, then I suppose she has found a great way to promote her own self-published book...go ahead and google her name. apparently alleging that a moron celebrity has wronged you will pop you up in the Google rankings faster than an eel moving on a slip-n-slide downhill. If nothing else she found a great way to advertise.

I tried looking on Hassett's website at the table of contents for her book and the contents weren't quite "word for word", and personally I think that when you're dealing with a topic like Celiac there probably will be a lot of overlap in material. Unless there truly are passages that are copied between the two books I'm wondering if this is more a case of publicity seeking.

EDIT: A popular author's website, Writer Beware Blogs!, has a piece on the lawsuit. Sounds like it takes a stronger stance on the side I came down on...in other words, WBB says Hassett is being an idiot.

The Writing Show Contest Update 5

2009-06-22T21:31:00.001-04:00

Well, it's Monday night.

I originally said I'd be aiming to have an entry by Monday; I said this on Thursday.

After I posted it online I realized that the 5000 word limit on the short story came to about 20 pages of text. There's no way I could do that in only five days' work; you're not an author, this isn't your full time job.

I don't have an entry ready for submission. I do have one ready for editing, though. The word count when all was done was about ten words shy of 6,000 words.

I am rather dissatisfied with it too. I felt that as the ending (and my self imposed deadline) loomed I had taken the quick way out and the ending seemed too tacked on, too much like something you'd expect from a young adult story.

There was more I wanted to do with it, but if I realized those ideas it would probably end up being 10,000 words or more, easily. And this was without editing. I don't know if the tone or voice was anything worth reading by someone else. I'm fully prepared to have my "first reader" come back to me telling me that it sucked.

Unfortunately it's my wife that will be reading it first, so chances are she won't come out and say how horrible it really is. But once it's trimmed by about a thousand words and any glaring errors are corrected I am hoping that it will be an entry. I also doubt I'll win, but my goal is to manage an entry. If I'm really lucky I'd have some feedback. I'm trying to face my fear of failure and criticism by entering this contest so I suppose that by redefining "winning" as even entering the thing...I'll reach that goal.

Right now I'm waiting for my wife to look at it and see what she can cut out and reword. Maybe there will be sections to redo, I don't know. But at any rate I'm hoping that I'll be able to export it to PDF and email it in to Paula B. at The Writing Show within a couple days.

The Writing Show Contest Update 4

2009-06-21T21:32:00.001-04:00

I worked a bit on the story again today. We actually spent some time at the park for a Father's Day picnic lunch, and while there I managed to add a few more words. I also worked on it while at my parents for a Father's Day dinner and a few more words when I could sneak them in.

Turns out I was wrong, it is very possible in spare time to fill in five thousand words over four days. I am currently at 4200 words. That isn't to say I'm keeping all those words, though. A lot of it will no doubt need to be trimmed. I just introduced the conflict in the story and next will come a bit of the twist. Then it'll need some major heavy-handed editing.

At this rate I may not make it in time for my Monday-night deadline, but I might be somewhat close. So instead of submitting it by Monday I may need to send it Tuesday or even Wednesday (although my family is planning an outing to see Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen that night...).

So now it's nearly nineteen pages. It's slowly shaping up.

The Writing Show Contest Update 3

2009-06-21T21:20:00.000-04:00

I managed to work on the story some more yesterday; an hour or so at home, a couple hours in the coffee shop at a Barnes and Noble. The page count came to 12 pages now...2400 words so far.

Again I'm worried because it's just getting into the story; everything else has been leading up to it, background and such. I don't know how much material of that nature is acceptable but I'm pretty sure that in a short story, that's a bit much. I'm hoping to trim it down after the fact. I'm really really hoping that maybe my wife would be willing to help with suggestions and editing since she would see it from the perspective of a reader while I'm seeing it from the perspective of, "Damn, this isn't how I pictured it..."

I'd spend the next three weeks trying to make it much better and still not have something I'd be comfortable turning in for the contest. Ugh.

Have I mentioned how crazy it is to work in a coffee shop? For some reason it was really full while we were there. Probably because of the rain. I was still surprised though given the number of studies that are more and more often painting the picture wherein Americans are basically illiterate hicks that can't tell the difference between reality shows and actual reality.

While sitting there I think I was privy to no fewer than three cell phone conversations. I enjoy it though. I make sure that people know I'm enjoying listening to their discussions. It makes me feel more like a participant in the world. I figure if they didn't want more participation from strangers, they'd take the conversation somewhere more private. Some of the looks I got, though, puzzled me, since this seems to make perfect sense to me but their glares say otherwise.

Anyway I hope to get into the meat of the story today. Wish me luck!

The Writing Show Contest Update 2

2009-06-20T21:30:00.001-04:00

Last night I was out rather late, but I did put in another hour or so and go the potential story length up to four and a half pages.

The opening seems to be way too long before finding a hook...I'm hoping that as I add more material to it there will emerge a better "entry point", and I'll just trim off the material that rambles before it.

I think my "hooking" skills need polishing.

Um...maybe that's not the right way to phrase the sentiment...

The Writing Show Entry Update 1

2009-06-19T21:37:00.001-04:00

Well, I said that I'd be trying to create an entry of some kind for the contest being held on The Writing Show's website for the Halloween holiday.

The story can be up to 5000 words...given the industry estimates of 250 words per page, that's a 20 page story. There's no way I could reasonably do that before Monday, but the goal is to write a story with a Halloween theme, not necessarily fill 20 pages just to fill 20 pages.

I spent some time last night at the keyboard trying to come up with a good start of a story. I spent a bit of time staring into space mulling over concepts, none of which seemed particularly scary and then having a few false starts before completing two pages of an opening.

My wife thought it could use some punching up. I don't disagree. But I figure I can worry about that later, if more of the story takes shape. I guess I can sit and polish the opening for days and not feel that it's good enough...but at some point I need to still actually have a story to edit.

So to that end I will worry about altering the opening later. I need to get some meat onto the skeleton now. Will I hit my goal of having a story ready by Monday? Maybe not. But I'm going to try...

A Self-Imposed Deadline: The Writing Show

2009-06-18T21:37:00.000-04:00

I've been lazy. Sort of.

I have plenty of excuses here...I have a four year old. I ride a stationary bike for an hour a night. I don't often get home until 5:00.

We have a comfortable schedule where usually I expect to get home around five, get things put away and sit for a moment, take time to pay bills or catch up on mail, dinner is usually anywhere from six to seven thirty, ride bike for an hour after changing clothes, come up and then I have some "free" time. I sometimes fill in some of that with reading. I also spend time on the blog, of course, and we as a family run errands and get shopping done usually around the dinner time, shoving everything further up so it feels like there's not much time or energy to accomplish more. Go to bed at around ten or eleven, alarm goes off near six in the morning, repeat...the truth is that because of my need for routine, this "comfy" routine is difficult for me to break out of; my routine becomes my excuse to use as "I'm too busy to do XYZ."

Since the surgery I was promising myself to try one of two things to dedicate some time to. One is creating a program (I have a couple ideas of the type of application I want in mind) and in the process start studying a programming language. The other is writing a novel.

I spent many hours agonizing over the pros and cons of each and decided on working on the program. I have been trying to spend an hour here and there working on it, and it's slow going since I have to Google for information in order to get different bits of functionality to work. But so far I'm hitting several milestones for myself. It's taken forever, but hey, chipping away at it still counts as progress.

But I saw that contest that Paula B on The Writing Show is holding wherein you can submit a story with a Halloween theme and possibly win $75. It must be less than 5,000 words and just tell a good Halloween story. Well, actually, I heard of the contest as an announcement on her podcast. If you're a wanna-be author, check out the link above for information on the podcast, the contest, and various mentorship packages Paula offers.

I heard her talk of the contest and thought to myself that I should try entering. I even wrote a blog posting about it. Then Paula herself found the entry and left a comment on the blog, saying that so far entries have been slow to come in! Well...if they're not getting a huge turnout just yet...maybe that means I could have a better chance of scoring that $75!

So I'm pledging here to try getting an entry in by Monday. I'll even update the blog with progress on the story to try keeping it honest. I'm taking a big step here for me...I've had one item published in a local anthology from the EMWP Project, and that's it. It's probably enough to technically say I've been published but it's not something I've made money with.

Mur Lafferty, host of I Should Be Writing, has given some of the best advice for wanna-be fiction writers. "You're allowed to suck." This is a huge hurdle for me to even sit in the chair and type...fear. Fear of sucking. I have to keep telling myself that it's okay to suck. If it's rejected then it's rejected. At least I wrote something and tried, and maybe writing something will help improve my skills.

So that's what I'll do. A 5000 word story (well, less) by Monday for submitting to The Writing Show, not the suck part. Well the story may suck but I'm not aiming to make it suck. The story submissions are due by August 31st, and people may enter up to 2 stories, so I could theoretically write another one and try; especially if people are slow to enter the contest...it'll boost my chances of winning! So don't you people get any ideas!!

Lunacy and Ctrl+Alt+Delete

2009-06-15T19:01:00.000-04:00

I just finished one book and am in the middle of another book that I thought I'd share.

The first one is Lunacy: The Best of the Cornell Lunatic. It is a large paperback filled with selections from, as the title suggests, the Cornell Lunatic, a student paper filled with satire and comics of various topics. The humor is a bit on the blue side at times so if you're more on the conservative side I'd recommend not bothering; if, on the other hand, reading an editorial by "Clark Kent" fighting rumors being spread in the media that a recent rise in breast cancer rates (especially in the Daily Planet building for some reason) are being caused by Superman's use of X-Ray vision makes you laugh like a crazed baboon then this book may just be worth checking out.

The second book is Ctrl+Alt+Del: Volume 1: This is a Great Idea. There's a great geek web comic called Ctrl+Alt+Del that chronicles the adventures of a computer gamer, Ethan, who is a total idiot, and his roommates and his wife (now). The first volume is a collection of the earliest comics of the series and was a nice revisit of his early adventures including the psychotic break he experienced when a certain video game sequel was released and how he met his gamer-girlfriend Lilah along with a few side bits commenting on new video games as they were released, such as some of the stupidities included with the programming logic of a certain Star Wars game. The whole King of Winter-een-mas arc during a heating failure in the apartment building was a nice setup for his later reign as the head of a video game religion (not covered in this book, though...I know about it from the online comic).

If you have any interest in geek comics, check out Ctrl+Alt+Del online. If you like humor on the risque side check out Lunacy. If you're not interested in either of them...well, thanks for reading anyway.

Writing Contest on The Writing Show!

2009-06-11T21:39:00.001-04:00

If you're an author or wanna-be author or just enjoy banging out short stories there is a contest for you to discover at The Writing Show's website. It's a Halloween short story contest. Details can be found from The Writing Show's news column on the index page. There's no fee to enter, the story must be 5000 words or less, and you can potentially win $75. What's there to lose other than your time?

I have often thought about trying my hand at writing and have found that it's a bit of a phobia of mine...confirmation of failure. I've written one short selection for a local writing group that was published in their anthology but all things considered I'm not sure it gave much more cred than the technical right to say I was published. I don't think I have a copy of it anymore, though; my fuzzy memory tells me I gifted it to my mother. It made her proud so it was worth it to me.

Anyway, check out the contest. The Writing Show is a podcast by Paula B. (who, like Mur Lafferty, is usually quite responsive to feedback from her listeners) one different aspects of the writing profession and has tips and hints and general information and interviews giving listeners information that spans multiple genres of books and writing styles. She also offers consultation services for editing and writing. More info is at the website.

Heaven Season Five: WAR!

2009-06-10T19:02:00.000-04:00

One of my favorite podcast authors has released the fifth (and final?) book in her Heaven series: WAR! Mur Lafferty has started releasing her novel on Podiobooks.com as a free audiobook. I've listened to every one of her Heaven series wherein two friends, Daniel and Kate, die near the time of the "end of times" on Earth and discover that the afterlife is not at all as they thought it would be; they travel through various afterlife worlds including Heaven and Hell and the Norse Heaven and even Dog Heaven and Hobo Heaven. They embark on a journey where they end up gaining god-like powers...there is simply too much from four books to round up here.

If you have an MP3 player...an iPod...etc...I really recommend checking out the novels. They are all free but if you want to donate to the author the donations can be made at Podiobooks.com, and the percentage given to the author is much better than what they normally get through a publisher. Even registering and getting a podcast feed from Podiobooks is free. You've got nothing to lose and enjoyment to gain!

Mur is one of my favorite podcast authors and is a well known personality in the podcasting world. She's also host of the podcast for wanna-be writers called I Should Be Writing. So next time you're plugged into your player while working out, trying to maintain your weight loss, consider adding Mur to your list of content to listen to!

Book Review Followup: The Emotional First Aid Kit

2009-06-08T19:03:00.001-04:00

I recently posted a review of the book The Emotional First Aid Kit by Cynthia L. Alexander. I noted that there wasn't any mention of addiction transfer and mused about emailing the author.

I managed to track her down (thanks, Kosmix.com!) and emailed her a note asking if another edition was in the works. She replied in part with the following:

Thank you so much for the feedback about the book, so glad to hear it is helpful to you. Interesting you should ask about this because we are coming out with a 2nd edition this summer and it will discuss transfer of addiction.

The second edition is really the original book, plus a few new chapters.

There you have it! If you liked what you saw from the review and Amazon links, wait a couple months and look to see if the 2nd edition is out yet!

The Emotional First Aid Kit

2009-06-06T19:05:00.001-04:00

I just finished the book The Emotional First + Aid Kit: A Practical Guide to Life After Bariatric Surgery by Cynthia L. Alexander, PsyD (Yes, the book has the plus sign, but Amazon lists it without...look at the cover shot from the link!)

It's a great guide for people who are considering bariatric surgery or are nearing the time for their surgery. It isn't anything I'd consider breakthrough; it's more of a personal coach to reiterate what your surgeons and support group will tell you about the surgery and life changes that go hand in hand with the surgery. It has several small case studies and tips sprinkled in text boxes throughout and many large-print repeats of sound bytes for inspiration and memorization. The book also has several exercises to follow, such as writing a pros and cons grid if you're on the fence about having the surgery.

The book explores the decision to have surgery, self-talk about the surgery and your weight, a plan to handle yourself in different situations after the surgery such as family dinners, and beginning a consistent exercise program and how relationships can change post-operatively (or post-weight change). There are also chapters dealing with depression and how the patient and other people react to the weight loss, as well as handling relapses and how to affect a change in behaviors and habits, as those will help or hinder your weight loss and weight maintenance success (the book differentiates between weight loss and weight maintenance, as many people are successful at weight loss...they just go "off" their diet and regain the excess weight.

At approximately 163 pages the book is a relatively quick read and is a good refresher of the information that patients should have received, but may not have or may not have listened to, as they went through the process of having the surgery. I recommend it to anyone about to go through the process as there aren't too many guides like this out there tailored specifically to bariatric patients.

Edit: The book does not cover information on addiction transfer, a phenomena I recently blogged about; I am beginning to suspect that this area of study is only recently gaining attention as a phenomena for bariatric patients...but still the book does contain useful information for anyone undergoing the surgery. Perhaps someday an updated edition could be released...I wonder if I could contact the author and find out?

Review: The Little Earth Book

2009-05-29T19:06:00.000-04:00

I picked up The Little Earth Book by James Bruges as a bargain price title at Barnes and Noble a few weeks ago; it was a small book, I figured it might be a nice little time killer while waiting for appointments and before falling asleep.

The back cover is promising; it has bullet points stating, among other things:

If everyone lived as we do in the U.S., it would take four earths to support us
Three-fourths of all plant species have become extinct since 1900
The number of people living on two dollars a day in the world has risen by 50% in the last twenty years
Charging interest is a major contributor to inequity among nations and billions of people
Genetically modified crops have farmers using more herbicides and pesticides, not less

The chapters are small and flow rather well as segues into the next topic.

Though interesting, every time I stop to think for a few moments about a point the chapters are trying to make I mentally stumble. The information slams you like a street preacher telling you every reason you're going to purgatory, or in this case an armchair activist telling you about all the ways the government and big pharma are trying to pull the wool over your eyes and destroy not just America but the whole planet.

Take this from the chapter "Making New Plants: improving on Creation":
"GM (Genetically Modified) foods have been consumed for seven years without harm, they say. But during this period food-derived illnesses have doubled. In California the number of children with autism has doubled in the last four years. The sperm count of men is steadily reducing. Allergies have greatly increased. But no one knows if this is consequence or coincidence because no monitoring of the long-term clinical or biochemical effects of GM has been done."

None of that has scientific proof of causality; it's speculation. But it throws in a lot of scary effects that maybe coulda sorta be contributed to or caused by this scary thing called "genetically modified food"...it's an abomination (improves on CREATION! Man tinkering with power we shouldn't be encroaching upon!) and so this is why you must be afraid.

The book runs the gamut of social, political, and economic woes and how these faceless corrupt politicians and corporations seem largely to blame. There's a lot of fascinating information, but in the end I find the book to be a bit like watching an accident...I'm drawn back to reading more chapters, slowly, but then toss it aside because I get fed up with the one-sided bias that gives me the impression it's trying harder to make me afraid to leave my house than educate me about a problem and the possible solutions.

I think this book is one of the great preaching-to-the-choir books. If you have a friend that likes telling you how natural foods will cleanse your colon and herbs are far superior to prescriptions because big pharma is out there spreading lies about their antibiotics (plus they will eventually lead to superbugs that will wipe out all of humanity then this could be a nice gift for them. If you're mildly curious about various planet wide ills and issues, this is a nice starting point from which to start researching some information...but I think you definitely need to pull from other sources to get a less biased and more rounded perspective on the problems than this book presents.

FREE COMIC BOOK DAY!

2009-04-25T21:53:00.000-04:00

This is a wonderful event that not only encourages you to support your local independent comic book store but also introduces people to the art and mythology of comic books!

Basically you go to the comic store and there's a selection of totally free comics to choose from. Free! No strings attached! These are usually introductions to new comic titles or some kind of supplemental story for established comic characters. While you're there you may as well shop around and see what titles catch your eye in the store. There are some really wonderful indy titles and stories from smaller publishers out there if you give them half a chance.

I'll be spending part of the day at Heroes Your Mom Threw Out in Elmira. The store is a real gem tucked away in a small corner of the town; the owner is delightfully friendly, and he goes out of his way to help his customers when he can. I'm not only referring to little things like pulling titles and setting them aside to make sure he doesn't sell out of a particular title if you request them; I'm talking about helping a customer with things that you probably won't get at your local Barnes and Noble. Yesterday we stopped in to see what had accumulated in my surgical absence and my wife discovered a flat tire on our vehicle. Jared, the owner, knew I am still restricted because of my surgery and he came out and changed the tire for my wife and I. I think that speaks volumes about the character in this small business owner!

Free Comic Book Day this year is May 2nd, 2009. Write it on your calendar and come out to the local comic store for your free loot and catch up with some of your childhood memories! Go to the Free Comic Book Day website and use the store locator on the left hand side of the page to find the retailer nearest to you!